AUTOMATIC WAREHOUSE FOR EMPTY GLASS BOTTLES
The Nuova Fanal Glass factory in Mexico City has developed a new automatic warehouse for storing empty glass bottles, connected to the finished products automatic warehouse that Grupo Modelo built in Piedras Negras.
Nuova Fanal is the largest glass producer in Mexico. They produce a total of 10,000,000 bottles a day in three production plants: Tierra Blanca, Veracruz and San Luis Potosi.
Problems and objectives
Beer production in the Modelo plant reaches very high quantity levels, it was therefore necessary to develop an automatic warehouse for storing empty bottles. In the first phase it is already providing production with 4 million bottles a day.
The purpose for installing an automatic warehouse is to guarantee a large buffer of empty bottles serving the beer bottling lines.
The solution and the results
The glass warehouse is made of self-holding scaffolding that is 36 m tall, and 5 rack feeders that are 35 m tall, equipped with DIGISAT satellite for pick-up and depositing at multiple depths (up to 7 depths).
The warehouse is capable of storing up to 36,000 pallets. The objective is having a sufficient supply of empty glass bottles able to cover two weeks demand, and, thanks to this multi-depth solution, the solution was reached only using 5 machines. An area for receiving goods on lorry has been provided for. Here pallets of empty glass bottles are unloaded and checked and ultimately stored inside of the automatic warehouse. This warehouse is connected to the finished products warehouse through a finger, more than 100 metres long, transferring empty glass bottles from the glass factory to the production area of the brewery department.