The HotFill+ System from KHS, which can be integrated into any PET production line, is opening up completely new avenues in flexible light bottle design, enabling cost-optimized and efficient hot fill production.
Hot filling is used to guarantee the quality and long shelf life of certain products. To date, relatively heavy PET bottles with vacuum panels were needed to compensate for the shrinkage of the bottles after they had been filled with a product heated to around 85°C and then cooled.
The KHS HotFill+ System compensates for shrinkage after hot filling by adding a certain amount of nitrogen to the headspace of the bottle in an ingenious process that is easy to use. In combination with a simplified stretch blow mold process to produce bottles that are more thermally stable, since 2007 this impinging of nitrogen has been successfully tested and installed on several filling lines by technological leader of the market for PET stretch blow molding, KHS Corpoplast. The HotFill+ System has recently become available for higher machine capacities of up to 43,000 bottles per hour and a specific output of 1,800 bottles an hour per station.
The advantages are convincing. The bottle weight can be reduced, creating new and hitherto undreamed-of marketing possibilities for bottle and label design. Energy is saved during stretch blow molding and the efficiency of the line is increased. At the end of the day, KHS' HotFill+ System further reduces production costs per bottle, thus optimizing the total operating costs.
| Manfred Rückstein Tel.: +49(0)231-569-1339 Fax: +49(0)231-569-1226 manfred.rueckstein@khs.com |
