Case study: sensors boost beverage bottling
6 Jun 2016
Fluid level sensors have been vital in reducing downtime for the UK site of a global drinks manufacturer.
At the Nelson facility of Cott Beverages – one of the world’s largest producers of beverages on behalf of retailers, brand owners and distributors – ensuring maximum uptime is a key priority.
It’s an issue that particularly applies to each of the site’s five filling lines for still and carbonated drinks, as well as the two aseptic bottling lines housed in a separate plant on a neighbouring site.
On a typical multi-bottle filler, one litre and 500ml carbonated soft drinks like colas are bottled at around 19,000 units per hour, which allows a 40 millisecond fill-time per unit.
The syrup is mixed with water, carbonated, and then fed under pressure to the filling bowl, a ring-shaped header tank above the filling nozzles.
Controlling the level of liquid in the filling bowl is critical to the process as it determines the accuracy of fill. Margins can be squeezed by a run of poor fill. In addition, identifying which conventional level sensor is faulty, replacing it, testing, calibrating and cleaning, can take around four hours of downtime, equating to the filling of about 80,000 bottles.
The installation of LFP Inox fluid level probes from SICK UK has, the company says, delivered a replacement solution with far-reaching benefits for the whole Lancashire-based plant.
The hygienic level sensors with IO-Link offered the improvements in performance and data output required. Cott Beverages then worked with the SICK technical team to determine the correct specification.
Better control
Connection to the three sensors is made via IO-Link and a single gateway integrating all three to the Profibus network. This provides digital access to diagnostic data in each – allowing monitoring of the operating status of an individual sensor – and an alarm can be triggered before any failure.
In the event of a fault developing with one of the sensors, the alarm and operator instructions on the filler’s human-machine interface (HMI) control panel facilitate the switching out of the faulty device.
An average level of the two remaining sensors is maintained until an assessment can be made during routine maintenance downtime. The SICK LFP microwave sensors also have their own LED and digital readout, so faults can be detected either on the HMI or on the filler bowl itself. A two-metre long probe is kept in the back-up spares to fit each application on the plant. In addition, the LFP’s self-teach can simplify setup. The unit can be fitted at the press of a button.
Trials have demonstrated that a sensor replacement could be completed during the one-hour Clean In Place (CIP) phase between production runs; a quarter of the time it took with the previous level sensing technology, says SICK.
