BOTTLE MAKING 17 PETplanet Insider Vol. 24 No. 10/23 www.petpla.net Freshsafe PET is fully recyclable. The container’s suitability for use with foods has also been officially established by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among other institutions. As the interior glass coating is less than 0.1μm thick and chemically bonded to the inside wall, it is flexible. It cannot be accidentally removed or flake off when force is applied to the bottle, with the coating only separating off during the recycling process. As the coating is also completely transparent, the PET bottles retain their crystal-clear appearance. Characteristic for Vilsa mineral water are its pH, natural ingredients and gentle mineral content. This makes it a sensorily demanding product, however, that reacts sensitively to off-flavours or sunlight. Thanks to the wafer-thin barrier of chemically pure glass in the containers, the mineral water’s natural taste is now protected against oxygen pickup and loss of flavour and CO2 for a considerably longer period of time. The PET material also loses none of its proven benefits, meaning that consumers profit from top product quality. Intensive development process The first coated bottles are now being distributed to retailers. The market launch was preceded by an intensive development process. Although a number of well-known bottlers of challenging sensitive products such as juice or carbonated soft drinks have relied on Plasmax barrier technology for years, its use for natural organic mineral water was new to the specialists from Dortmund. At a series of workshops on site the experts from KHS steadily worked to meet requirements in the runup to the launch of Freshsafe PET for all container sizes from 0.5 to 1.5 litres. “We ran extensive simulations to effect an optimum separation behaviour of the reaction gas in the coating process and thus achieve perfect distribution of the wafer-thin glass coating in the bottle,” explains Stefan Knappmann, head of Sales for Germany and Switzerland at KHS. “Our Bottles and Shapes specialists defined the exact recipe for each container size, product and carbon dioxide level.” To start with, a latest-generation InnoPET Blomax stretch blow moulder was installed that was combined with the barrier unit to form an InnoPET Freshsafe block during the later development process. Following preform infeed, stretch blow moulding, cooling and transfer, the PET bottles are coated according to the Plasma Impulse Chemical Vapor Deposition (PICVD) method, a process first used in the pharmaceutical industry. Here, the containers are turned upside down and passed on to the coating chamber where a reaction gas mixture is introduced into the bottle in a fine vacuum and this subsequently transformed into a plasma state by microwaves. In this state silicon oxide – the chemically pure glass commonly found in most households – is deposited on the inside of the container. At Vilsa, bottles are stretch blow moulded and coated at a maximum rate of 24,500 containers per hour. The most popular non-returnable format is the 0.75 l bottle. www.khs.com Henning Rodekohr, CEO of the Vilsa Group (2nd from right), Stefan Knappmann, head of Sales for Germany and Switzerland at KHS (3rd from left), Joachim Weippert, Vilsa’s head of Production and Technology (2nd from left), and engineers from both companies At Vilsa, the latest-generation InnoPET Blomax stretch blow moulder was first installed and than combined with the barrier unit to form an InnoPET Freshsafe block during the later development process. Vilsa Brunnen Otto Rodekohr GmbH is the first mineral water bottling plant to implement the Plasmax barrier technology from KHS. Back in 2019 the mineral water bottling plant switched the material of all of its non-returnable bottles over to rPET.
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