Sterilizer cleared out

At an Indonesian production site of the world’s leading dairy food brand, sterilized milk is produced in huge quantities. As usual in a production plant of that size, efficiency needs to be continuously optimized.

The Thai subsidiary of a French based manufacturer / integrator was responsible for providing such an efficient solution, while AmbaFlex helped them by supplying a compact, innovative solution to reduce product loss to a minimum.

The ready to drink milk is canned and sterilized before secondary packing. But if the downstream tray packing equipment fails, the sterilizer needs to be cleared of products immediately. If not, the temperature will damage them and at least 24,000 cans will have to be discarded as waste, costing a huge amount of money in product loss and disposal costs, as well as the resulting hours of down time before restart.

However, there was a contradiction in the requirements; a huge storage capacity for inline storing of all the cans while the actual space was limited.

AmbaFlex therefore proposed their AccuVeyor AVo concept as the solution. This consists of two SpiralVeyor SVm mass flow spiral conveyors positioned inline and parallel to the normal flow. In case of a downstream stoppage now, the complete contents of the steriliser is cleared out of the system. Then, when downstream processes are up and running again, the cans are automatically fed back into the packing flow without any manual intervention.

The total AVo system utilises a belt which is 120 meters long and 500mm wide. This is enough to store 24,000 cans on just 8 square meters of floor space, thus achieving both of the customer’s objectives!! The total unit is 4.6 meters high and represents a good example of how to utilize the free space available in the third dimension.

Only AmbaFlex’s “Multi Chain technology” is capable of handling such extreme loads. This involves not one, but no less than 5 parallel 100mm tracks to carry the load, each driven by a separate roller guided chain

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