Shenzhen: filling technology for mineral water

The family firm Shenzhen Ganten Food & Beverage Co., located in the eponymous boom town of Shenzhen, PR China, has opted for filling technology from Krones in its mineral water bottling operations. After starting off with local Chinese filling techno.goy, the company has now invested in some Krones high-tech lines, featuring blow-moulder/filler monoblocs.
After ten years of bottling purified water, the company decided to go into the mineral water market with a spring in Huizhou, about an hour’s drive to the east of Guangzhou. In 2006, Shenzhen integrated its first made-in-Germany machine, an Autocol pressure-sensitive labeller, followed in 2007 by a second and in 2008 by a third.
Early in 2009, the company ordered two lines, each featuring a blow-moulder/filler monobloc with a Contiform S16 stretch blow-moulding machine including a Prejet preform rinser and preform conveyor, plus a Volumetic VOG-PET filler, each rated at 28,000 containers an hour. The monobloc systems are identical in construction, which simplifies spare parts inventories and means that both bottles, the 0.56-litre bottle and the 0.34-litre size, can be filled at the same speed on both monobloc systems. All that’s necessary is to replace the handling parts. After being blow-moulded, the bottles are conveyed directly to the filler.
With the filling technology of the Volumetic VOG-PET. Shenzen is using a volumetric filling system fitted with a metering chamber. The fill quantity predosed there is passed into the PET bottle using a full-jet contactless process. The advantage of this filling technology, in addition to its high level of accuracy, is that it is also able to handle non-conductive mineral water products.