Effective buffering for unusual bottle shapes

Les Grands Chais de France (LGCdF) in the Alsatian town of Petersbach is France’s biggest wine exporter, with a successful range of spirits as well. Its best-known brand is the Boris Yeltsin Vodka. The Yeltsin Vodka family is handled on a modularised Topmodul labeller with a dynamic Accutable buffering system.
First-class products in unusual bottles featuring top-quality dress – that’s the recipe for success from the marketing strategists in Petersbach. Pascal Martin, Production Director of the LGCdF Group, explains: “Our 0.5-l, 0.7-l and 1-l Boris Yeltsin bottles don’t have straight lines, they’re oval and have a prominent foot. So this means they can’t be backed up.” In order to achieve speeds of 18,000 bottles an hour and enhanced labelling accuracy coupled with more flexibility, a new labeller was installed in the existing line. And for this purpose the un-back-uppable bottles had to be buffered in pressureless mode in an ultra-confined space. LGCdF opted for the Accutable buffering system. “On the Accutable, all our special-shaped bottles run with pressure-less efficiency even at high line speeds.”
The Accutable system consists of two conveyor chains running in opposite directions on a horizontal level, whose infeed and discharge speeds are measured and converted into a speed differential. This speed differential in its turn drives the movable rerouting carriage, which uses a transfer wheel to actively move the containers from one conveyor to the other. Bottles are moved in and out of the buffer by linear traversing of the dynamically controlled rerouting carriage, which utilises the available buffering capacity to a greater or lesser extent in dependence on the time needing to be buffered. By storing several different parameter sets in the control system, different special-shaped bottles can be buffed on an Accutable in responsively pressureless mode.