Automatic Filling Technology for Large Wine Bottles
Nov 25, 2021
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At present, there are more and more varieties of wine sold in the market, with various bottle types. In order to attract all kinds of potential customers, wine manufacturers have made great efforts in products packaging. In recent years, large-capacity bottled wines of 3 liters or 5 liters have been sold in the market. Wine manufacturers have never had suitable and simple devices for filling 3L or 5L large bottles of wine. Usually, the processed finished raw wine to be filled is poured into a 3L/5L large bottle by the external control valve of the pipeline. The liquid level of the wine is manually observed by human eyes, and then the packaging treatment is carried out. The filling process is all manually operated, and the container conversion process is prone to gain pollution, which is also low in production efficiency and unsuitable for small batch production.
By analyzing the production process of super-capacity wine, we found the following problems: in the past, when filling 3L and 5L bottles, filling equipment and packaging equipment were temporarily pieced together for use. It was necessary to connect the wine pipeline to the manual filling machine, and the equipment such as the printer, the cap shrinking machine and conveying chain channel, which all needed the power supply. As a result, the site was messy, and the pipelines and wires were rambling. It took a long time to prepare the whole set of equipment for operation, and the electricians needed to temporarily connect electricity. All that leads to fairly low efficiency, as wine filling equipment can only operate when the filling machine on the production line is turned on at the same time.
Aiming at this problem, an equipment team independently developed an automatic filling and packaging platform for large-capacity wine bottles.
After a year of continuous improvement, the equipment runs well and stably. The efficiency is steadily improved, and high-quality and safe wines are filled. The whole centralized filling platform includes automatic filling machines, corkers, cap shrinking machines, laser printers and conveyor chains. The automatic filling machine and cap shrinking machine are designed and manufactured by the company team alone. The core equipment of the whole platform is the negative pressure automatic filling machine. The automatic filling machine consists of wine jars, automatic wine filling system, filling nozzles, membrane filtration system and negative pressure vacuum system, nitrogen protection system, CIP cleaning system, electric control parts, etc. The equipment has applied for an invention patent.
In the production process, a wine pipeline is connected from the storage tank of the raw wine to be filled to the inlet of the wine pump of the filling machine. After being pressurized by the wine pump, the raw wine is sterilized and filtered by a 0.45um filtering system and then enters the wine tank of the filling machine. A sensor for detecting the liquid level is installed in the wine tank to control the work of the wine pump of the filling machine. The liquid level in the wine tank is controlled by the automatic wine replenishing system to keep stable filling. After the filling machine is started, the negative pressure vacuum system starts to work. The operator uses a pneumatic switch to control the up-and-down movement of the filling nozzle, which can be adjusted according to the bottle type to control the wine line in the bottle after filling. When the filling nozzle is inserted into the bottle to a set height, the centering mechanism on the nozzle seals the bottle, and the inlet valve in the filling nozzle is opened. The wine is filled into the bottle under the action of the vacuum system. When the wine touches the nozzle in the bottle, the liquid level meets the requirements and the filling is completed. The operator controls the pneumatic switch to lift the filling nozzle to complete the filling process. The negative pressure vacuum system and the design of the filling nozzle ensure that the capacity of the filled finished wine meets the requirements. It avoids the control error of the liquid level caused by the human eye observation operated in the past manual filling. During the whole filling process, the nitrogen protection system works all the time. With the rise and fall of the liquid level in the wine tank, the nitrogen control valve opens and closes, so that sufficient nitrogen is kept above the liquid level of the original wine in the wine tank, which prevents the influence of oxygen in the air on the wine body and ensures the stability of wine quality. After filling, connect softened water from the wine inlet pipeline, and start the filling machine to clean and sterilize the wine jar, filling nozzle and pipeline. The whole filling process is easy and safe to operate. Negative pressure vacuum filling, aseptic operation and automatic wine replenishment improve the efficiency of the whole filling equipment, and the filled wine fully meets the national food safety regulations. After random inspection by the company's quality inspection department, the qualified rate of samples reaches 100%.
According to the statistics of production data, the filling efficiency is increased by 30%. The filled wine is packaged by the corker, and then put on the conveyor chain for laser coding and capping. The laser coding machine, the capping machine and the conveyor chain are integrated on a movable fixed platform, and a centralized control box is installed at one end of the platform to centrally control the three devices. The whole platform can be powered by plugging in an industrial waterproof connector, which is convenient and quick to operate, eliminating the electrician's temporary operation of power connection and other links. The use of the whole platform can reduce the production preparation time of the equipment from the original 2 hours to 40 minutes. The equipment is fixed on the platform, which has no vibration during the use with a good code spraying effect. The qualified rate of packaged products reaches 100%, which reduces the loss of packaging materials caused by defective products. When the production is finished, the whole platform can be conveniently moved to the warehouse for storage.
The original large-capacity bottle filling platform has stable equipment operation, qualified sampling quality of finished wine and high production efficiency during use. The use of the whole filling platform has changed the production of large-capacity bottled wine from manual workshop production to mechanized automatic filling under modern advanced filling technology, realizing high-efficiency, high-quality, sterile and safe production, meeting the high standards and strict requirements of the food industry, and laying a solid theoretical foundation and practice for large-scale and mass production of large-capacity bottled wine in the future.