pplier of fillers to the juice industry, Federal Mfg., powered by Pro Mach, developed a new high-speed modular series filler that enables companies to maximize uptime and throughput to meet market demand. The compact filler's elegant design, state-of-the-art controls, and semi-automatic dedicated clean-in-place unit offer high productivity with speeds up to 450 1.75 liter PET juice carafes per minute.The new high-speed filler, which is 3-A Process certified, uses highly efficient, gravity level filling valves on a 120-inch pitch. The 70-valve unit is integrated with a 21-station Fowler/Zalkin pick-and-place capper from Fowler Products, a Pro Mach business. Fowler also supplies the cap elevator sorter, cap chute, and air conveyors that transfer 70-millimeter caps for 1.75-liter PET juice carafes to the capper.
The filler features an Allen-Bradley PLC-based control system with CompactLogix. An Allen-Bradley 10-inch PanelView Plus is used for HMI.
The new filler has a dedicated, closed-coupled, clean-in-place unit, which controls the circulation of cleaning fluids. An acid metering system controls the concentration of cleaning fluids with a conductivity probe.
The unit includes an integrated bottle rinser that grips the empty bottles by the neck and inverts them over a nozzle. An ionized air rinse takes the electrostatic charge out of the bottles to release any particles that may be inside.
"This is an exceptional high-speed, high-throughput juice filling solution," said Mike Collins, Federal Mfg.'s Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "It represents the utmost in Federal's dedication to robust, long-lived solutions."
