from 14 down to 4costcutting in a special way optima consumer was commissioned with replacing several existing decentralized filling and packaging lines with a smaller number of new lines. the range of products involved is considerable fungicides and herbicides in numerous bottle and container formats and product variations are processed.system flexibility was thus a key criterion for the technological design of the processing lines. a prerequisite for centralising the plants was that crosscontamination in the equipment needed to be reliably prevented when changing over products. another special requirement was compliance with atex guidelines up to zone 1, which means very high safety levels to prevent explosion. decentralized cleaning concept saves timeoptima consumer realised several filling lines for the group of fungicides and herbicides. all parts in contact with products can be quickly exchanged in order to reduce the number of lines and to ensure rapid changeover between products and formats. all other components in the complete lines, including bottle and canister unscramblers, cappers, check weighers, sealers, labellers, case packers and palletisers, can be adjusted primarily by machine control as well as via pluggable format parts.the filling machines in all lines are of a unique modular design. the permanently installed machines have mass flow metering systems built on top. the difference to conventional systems is that when products are switched or a cleaning cycle takes place, all parts in contact with the product are removed from the machine as a module and transported to a decentralized cleaning station. new, precleaned modules can be immediately docked as soon as the used modules are removed. the main advantage of this is time savings filling modules can be independently cleaned and prepared for the next product without interrupting ongoing production. the cleaning stations are controlled with equipment from optima consumer.the mass flow metering machines vary in their filling capacity. bottle lines are used to fill volumes up to one litre, while canister lines can fill up to 2.5 litres. dosing accuracy is designed to ideally fulfil the prepackaging directive. closing takes place via a gantry system optima kvg and an optima v100 capper with servotechnology. identical check weighers are followed by labelling machines. to comply with atex safety regulations, the plants are divided into zones with different requirements. specific components are used within these zones as needed.
