The liquid line is generally made up of several machines designed to pack liquid products, which can be pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, cosmetics, but also beverage-type products such as wine, water and all other liquid products. Let’s see together how a liquid packaging line is usually composed and what its advantages are.
The “standard” composition of a liquid line
There are several configurations of a packaging line for liquids. Today we will show you a “standard” one. Let’s take as an example a large-scale pharmaceutical that we all know to be syrup.
The syrup packaging line starts with bottles and product feeding systems. Feeding can be done automatically and/or manually. The type of bottle feeding depends on whether the bottles are plastic or glass. Glass bottles are, for obvious reasons, much more fragile and therefore less suitable for a fully automatic feeding system.
The heart of the liquid line is the filler-capper, which, as its name indicates, fills and caps the bottles. The filling system can be intermittent and divided or continuous. The cover depends on the type of cover used. There are several types of caps, caps that can be screw caps, rubber caps, pressure caps, caps along with a meter, to name a few. These caps are also automatically fed by a cap feeder. After the filling and corking operations, the bottle is labeled, thanks to a labeller, which will apply, depending on the customer’s needs, a self-adhesive label on one or both sides of the bottle. Once labeled, the bottle will be placed in a box together with its prospectus using a horizontal cartoner (more frequent in the case of automatic lines) or vertical cartoner.
The line ends when the boxes are grouped and placed in the carton thanks to a cartoner so that they can be easily transported later.
What are the advantages of an automatic liquid packaging line?
There are two possibilities for a company that deals with packaging: you can choose to pack your products (in this case we are talking about liquid products) in a semi-automatic way, having many independent machines and many operators who manage them, or choose to automate everything by choosing a line .
The line makes it possible to increase efficiency, reach higher speeds and reduce the number of operators required on the line. The machines are increasingly intelligent and autonomous, so one/two operators per line are sufficient. The role of the operators in this case is to supervise the line and intervene in case of emergency.
The speed of a liquid line depends on the viscosity of the product: if it is a liquid almost similar to water, high speeds can easily be reached, if it is a very viscous product, like a syrup, the speed will be lower. Also, to increase the accuracy of the filling, it is better to opt for a filler that works in a fractional way with more needles that will divide the dosage of the bottle.
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