PETpla.net Insider 09 / 2017

82 PRODUCTS PET planet Insider Vol. 18 No. 09/17 www.petpla.net New hot fill options Fogg Filler is a market leader in the design and manufacture of rotary filling systems for the liquids industry. Temperature management for hot-fill applications has been made simple with using the Fogg recovery trough, says the company. The built-in sensor allow to manage product temperature in the bowl and filling valve tip temperatures, when line stops occur. The operator can easily send the trough into position to purge the cooled product in the valves until production can be resumed, sending only a small amount of product back to rework. When customers have specifications that will not allow the product to encounter the atmosphere by using the trough system, Fogg has developed another option. This new system recirculates the product within the bowl including the product in the valve tips. This virtually eliminates the product loss associated with other hot fill methods. To switch from cold-filling to hot-fill on a new Fogg, it can be as easy as warming up the product and go, according to the company. Fogg’s proven technology is intended to lower operating costs and to provide reliability for the production lines. www.foggfiller.com Time saving by fast conveying mandrel changeovers In developing a new fast change- over concept KHS has greatly reduced changeover times on its InnoPET Blomax stretch blow moulders. The optimised active mandrel now enables format changeover times to be reduced by more than half for all standard neck designs. This new option is of interest to all bever- age producers who bottle products with different types of neck. During a format changeover operators not only switch over the blow moulds but other components as well. The conveying mandrel in particular is of especial signifi- cance in this process as a full change- over of these format parts was extremely time-consuming to date. “Depending on its size a high-performance Blomax stretch blow moulder can have around 280 conveying mandrels,” explains Marco Böhnke, product manager for stretch blow moulding technology at KHS. When a product is changed over during bever- age production and requires a change in the type of bottle neck, to date each individual mandrel had to be exchanged in its entirety. KHS has now developed a variant which is much quicker to replace, making changeovers ergonomic and tool free without any great force being required. Besides the conveying mandrels the shields, grippers and other parts can now also be easily switched over using quick-change mechanisms; in some cases these can be adjusted without any installation work being required by simply rotating the part. Thanks to the above measures formats can be changed over in less than half of the time operators used to need. In its new development KHS has retained its tried-and-tested active man- drel design. “The optimised changeover process is distinguished by the fact that only the actual format part, i.e. the man- drel head itself, is replaced, with the entire mandrel mechanism left untouched. This enables customers to save money and gain valuable production time,” states Böhnke, as a mandrel can now be replaced in about 5s. The new procedure can be easily ret- rofitted on any InnoPET Blomax Series IV stretch blow moulder as following one-time adjustment of the conveying mandrels no further mechanical or electrical conver- sion of the machine is required. One KHS customer has already subjected the quick- change process to successful long-term testing. The system is also to be installed at a company on the German market in the near future. www.khs.com .com 100815dmyL Go with the flow. September 11-15, 2017 Messe München Hall: A4 Booth #232