Finding the Best Liquid Filling Equipment for Your Needs
Here are factors that should be considered when searching for the correct bottling machinery for your liquid filling line. Liquid filling machinery selection is driven by your product characteristics, viscosity being the primary metric. Peanut butter is put in a bottle by a liquid filling machine, as is acetone. Peanut butter and acetone are both liquids but at opposite ends of the viscosity range. The bottling machinery needed to move peanut butter into a bottle is very different than the liquid filling machinery used for acetone.
Liquid Filler Technologies
There are four different liquid filler technologies, piston, timed flow, metered flow and overflow. Peanut butter is best handled by a piston filler that keeps the product warm and therefore at a lower viscosity, all driven by a strong pneumatic cylinder. Acetone on the other hand can be gravity fed into an overflow filler.
Stroke length meters the product in a piston filler. Change the stroke length to deliver a different quantity of product to the container. Piston fillers are best at higher viscosity liquids or filling liquids containing chunks of fruit or vegetables.
Use time to meter your product if you have a filling machine that delivers product at a consistent flow rate. Light oils and aqueous solutions work well in this type of filling machine.
Use a gear or lobe pump to deliver product at a consistent volume corelated to pump shaft rotations. This metered flow filling machine lends itself to thicker products without particulates in the liquid.
Overflow filling systems are also used for light oils and aqueous products where product needs to be filled to the same visual level. Product on the shelf will appear to be filled to the same level irrespective of container fluctuations.
Selecting a container is the next step as you design your liquid filling system. A simple straight sided round container can be handled by off the shelf components. If you choose a novelty container you will increase the time to design manufacture and test your bottling machine.
As a business starts and expands the needed production rates from their liquid filling system increases. A startup company’s first filling machine may fill a single bottle at a time with an operator handling the containers by hand before and after filling. Increasing the number of nozzles on a liquid filling machine increases production rates. Liquid filling systems that have as many twelve nozzles filling at the same time are not uncommon. In these filling systems a conveyor belt moves the containers under the nozzles, pauses while the liquid fills the containers, and then moves the filled containers out.
Accutek Sales engineers have the training and experience to assist you with selecting the optimum bottling machinery for your production rates, product and container combination.
