The Arcobräu Gräfliches Brauhaus GmbH & Co KG brewery, headquartered in the Lower Bavarian village of Moos, has installed a new filler from Krones AG as well as a Checkmat bottle inspector and the requisite conveyors.
The Arcobräu Brewery has been successively modernising its entire facility for years with the help of Krones; from the brewhouse, the fermentation and storage cellars, all the way through to the bottling kit. In 1998, the brewery installed a Linatronic 712 empty-bottle inspector, followed in 2006 by a KES bottle washer, and now the Modulfill HES filler with crowner, plus a Checkmat FM-HF fill level inspector with logo detection, together with the requisite bottle conveyors.
The Modulfill HES filler is an energy-efficient, intelligent, probe-controlled filling system, without a vent tube, featuring a tubular ring bowl with 96 filling valves and an 18-head crowner. With its rated output of 33,000 0.5-litre NRW bottles per hour, it is designed to handle both top- and bottom-fermented beers, and alcohol-free types as well.
“With this technology, we can enhance the stability of the beer’s taste,” said brewery director Holger Fichtel.
The product-friendly filling system of the Modulfill HES provides enhanced levels of hygiene and filling stability, minimises fobbing, and ensures accurate fill quantities. The bottles are pressurised and vented via two separate gas paths, which prevents liquid passing from the filled bottle into the pressurisation channel, therefore providing considerable advantages in terms of filling stability and hygiene. During pressurisation, no residual liquid can penetrate into the empty bottles.
The Checkmat FM-HF installed downstream of the filler inspects the filled bottles for over- and underfills, with filling valve and crowner head assignments, and also incorporates a closure monitoring feature and logo detection for the crown. A new Siemens S7 control system regulates all the bottle conveyors between the unpacker and the packer, including integration of the existing machines and conveyor systems. The empty-bottle inspector and the filler are monobloc-synchronised electronically, which enables the buffering times between the machines to be optimised. In the new bottle conveyors, only efficient, energy-economical drives are used.
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