Avoiding risks during bottle filling

Design and automate a plant for filling and packaging 44,000 square PET bottles per hour for the largest Italian bottler of mineral water? ACMI S.p.A. was faced with this task and developed a plant comprising interlinked machines. The entire process should be productive and three appropriately trained users should be able to control it. Pilz took on the risk assessment and developed the necessary safety measures to ensure safe interaction of the machines.
The result is a safe, productive packaging process.

There are many individual steps behind the bottling of mineral water, and therefore many plant components, from the blow-moulding/filler block that blow-moulds, fills and seals PET bottles, a complex design of conveyors conveys bottles to control and labelling stations and finally to the packaging machines and palletisers.

Risk assessment for packaging machines

To determine which risks are possible when operating the plant and which protective measures are necessary, ACMI, manufacturer of complete end-of-line systems and packaging machinery, consulted with its long-standing partner Pilz. monitoring of the safety functions is performed by the configurable small controller PNOZmulti 2 that communicates with the plant automation system via Profinet. Coded, non-contact safety switches PSENcode prevent manipulation and ensure that the minimum distance is maintained.

• Pilz supports its customers with its many years of expertise in every aspect of risk assessment
• Creation of an individual safety concept according to the current status of the standards, taking into consideration productivity
• PNOZmulti 2 and PSENcode can be seamlessly integrated into virtually all existing automation solutions

ACMI S.p.A. is an Italian company specialized in the production of high technology bottling and packaging lines. The company, based in Fornovo Taro, in the province of Parma (Italy), started up as a manufacturer of palletisers and depalletisers for the food and beverage industry and went on to specialize in all packaging processes.