Variable, flexible packing

Austria’s biggest winery, Wegenstein, significantly upsized its production capacities in 2005 with an entirely new bottling line. Featuring state-of-the-art rinsing and filling processes, the Krones line fills non-returnable wine bottles at an hourly output of up to 16,000 bottles and packs them in cartons, crates and shrink packs. At the same time, the winery commissioned a dry end for the new line, an existing returnable-glass line and a beverage carton line as well.
The intermittent packer Blitzpac Junior packs the wine bottles in cartons, created inline by a Variocart carton erector. The alternative is to pack the non-returnable glass bottles and the 1-l Tetra beverage cartons on a Variopac TFS 30, which offers an option for handling trays and shrink films. To assemble the beverage cartons in blocks of four with a handle as well, a handle applicator is provided. When it came to the palletising system, Wegenstein wanted to have the carton line, the non-returnable glass line and the returnable glass line handled by two palletisers. A Robot 3A palletises the plastic crates from the returnables line, as well as trays. A second robot of the same type looks after the plastic crates, cartons or trays from the non-returnable-glass line or the beverage carton line. From these two infeed conveyors, it is able to assign the packs to two pallets, deciding on the basis of the back-up which line takes priority at any particular moment, and palletises one layer at a time. The full pallets from both palletisers are passed on a travelling carriage to a shared stretch-wrapper, and continue to the full-pallets removal point, separated for europallets and half-pallets.
Krones also uses the travelling-carriage concept for supplying the three lines. A generously dimensioned bulk-glass buffer that can handle a complete truckload of bulk glass comprising a maximum of 30 pallets feeds the individual pallets to the travelling carriage route section. This travelling carriage bridges a distance of around 40 m and serves the lines.
Besides the infeed where the bulk glass enters the buffer, there is a second access point for pallets with empty crates, pallets with layer pads, films or top sheets for the wrapper, cartons, closures, etc... Conversely, empty-pallet stacks or the layer pads from the bulk-glass pallets are removed from the line by this route.