PETpla.net Insider 11 / 2016

PACKAGING 29 PET planet Insider Vol. 17 No. 11/16 www.petpla.net equipped by Krones. In 2015, at its Ödemiş site in Izmir, the Turkish com- pany commissioned a NitroHotfill line from Krones with an output of 22,500 containers per hour. A year after instal- lation, a Krones team on site at the line launched tests to improve the com- pressed air system. After an upgrade and simple optimisation of the Conti- form 3 blow moulding machine, the line went back into normal operation. A test run has achieved extraordinary results, the company claims. With unchanged container quality, this modification has achieved 44% savings in compressed air consumption. The upgrade yields cash savings amounting to some EUR 40,000 per year based on a calculated machine running time of 6,000 hours per year. The company KHS is also showing that the potential of production equip- ment is still far from fully exploited. The company Mineralbrunnen Teinach GmbH has been using the KHS stretch blow moulding machine InnoPET Blomax Series III for the production of PET bottles since 2007. To cut the line’s energy consump- tion, the KHS experts have modi- fied its heater box in which the PET preforms are heated for subsequent stretch blowing. For Mineralbrunnen Teinach GmbH, this has yielded over 40% energy savings – savings made possible essentially by the use of new, advanced ceramic reflectors and pre- cision-adapted geometry in the heater boxes, explains Frank Goebel, Head of Service Engineering at KHS. (See PETplanet 5/2016 page 28) Thanks to the special design, the physical prop- erties of the ceramic elements have had a markedly beneficial effect on energy distribution, so less energy is needed to heat the preforms. In addi- tion, the reflectors and infrared radia- tors have been conPhotod in such a way that the bottle’s delicate thread zone is not unnecessarily heated. The cooling of this area can be reduced, says Goebel, thus saving further energy in Teinach. “Thanks to greater efficiency, it is often possible to shorten the heating section,” he adds. If fewer heating elements are neces- sary in the oven, energy consumption by the infrared radiators also drops as a consequence. www.khs.com www.krones.com www.interpack.com NitroHotfill line from Krones with an output of 22,500 containers per hour.