High bottling output from a small footprint

HiteJinro Beverage’s plant in Cheongwon, South Korea, is idyllically situated at the end of a valley in which the River Mushimcheon has its source. From springs 200 m underground, natural mineral water is extracted for bottling under the Seoksu brand. In 2013, the plant produced around 100 million fills, equivalent to 80 million L, in PET containers and gallon-size water dispensers. And sales are steadily rising.

HiteJinro wished to capitalise on Korea’s booming water market but was limited in production space. The answer came in the form of the ErgoBloc L from Krones, an all-in-one filling monobloc that has been up and running at the plant since early 2014.

The ErgoBloc L line has been dimensioned to fill 54,000 x 320 and 500 mL containers or alternatively 36,000 x 2.0 L bottles per hour, a maximum of 72 m³ of water per hour. It’s used for handling the main brand Seoksu, plus dealers’ brands, in two-shift operation.

The change to the ErgoBloc L has enabled the company to revamp the bottle design, including a reduction in weight, from 17 to 12.3 g for the 0.5 L bottle and from 48 to 37 g for the 2.0 L bottle, and incorporate a new closure, which is 1.2 g lighter than the previous one.

With the ErgoBloc L, everything happens inside an enclosed clean room measuring approximately 30 x 12 m. A Contifeed RS brings the preforms into the clean room. They are flushed with air to remove dust and then passed directly to the oven of the Contiform C324 blow moulder. This is followed by a Starmodule labeller with two Contiroll HS (high speed) stations, on which the PET containers are dressed in wraparound labels. Then a first PET-View 776 D uses five cameras to monitor the quality of the bottles or preforms in the blow moulder and oven.

The prelabelled bottles are passed to the electro-pneumatically controlled volumetric Modulfill VFJ filler, which fills the containers. Since the bottles are filled in non-contact mode, a high level of microbiological safety is assured. The filler passes the filled bottles to the synchronised capper. Having been blow moulded, labelled, filled and capped in a single machine, the containers then leave the ErgoBloc L and are inspected by a Checkmat FEM-IR, which uses infra-red technology to monitor the fill level and verify the labels’ positioning. Then the containers can leave the enclosed clean room on conveyors for end-of-the-line packaging and palletising.

The ErgoBloc L has entirely eliminated conveyors and buffering sections, because all the machines integrated have been seamlessly concatenated. This means the monobloc has a footprint that’s up to 70% smaller than a conventional layout