"European customers require that the error of each bottle of honey must be less than 0.3 grams, but our traditional equipment can't even aim at the bottle mouth." The complaint of Adil, the production director of a honey company in Yemen, opened the prelude to this technical breakthrough. In 2023, PLY-PACK's customized special-shaped bottle filling production line was officially put into production, using hard-core technology to turn "impossible" into an industry benchmark.
The conical glass bottle used by the customer has a bottle mouth diameter of only 18mm and a concave and convex carving on the bottle body. When the traditional filling machine is running at high speed, it is difficult for the robotic arm to capture the dynamic position of the bottle mouth, and honey often splashes onto the bottle body pattern. PLY-PACK engineers disassembled and found two major pain points:
. Bottle shaking causes visual positioning deviation
. Honey viscosity changes with temperature and affects flow rate
The solution is approached from two dimensions:
·Adaptive temperature control system: Micro thermocouples are implanted in the flow channel to automatically adjust the flow channel to the optimal range of 45-50¡æ according to the ambient temperature, stabilizing the honey viscosity at 3500cP
·3D dynamic tracking technology: A 240 frames/second laser scanner is used to build the three-dimensional coordinates of the bottle mouth in real time, and the robotic arm can complete the deviation correction within 0.2 seconds
The temperature in the Yemen workshop can reach 52¡æ in summer, which puts a severe test on the high temperature resistance of the equipment. PLY-PACK replaced the key modules with ceramic-based composite materials:
·The filling valve body temperature resistance is increased to 180¡æ
·The dustproof level of the transmission parts reaches IP68
·Installation of independent heat dissipation ducts, the temperature of the core area is always controlled below 28¡æ
“30,000 bottles were filled on the first day of startup, and none of them needed to be reworked.” Adil pointed to the data on the monitoring screen and exclaimed. This system can even identify the tilt angle of the bottle body of 0.5°, and maintain a filling accuracy of ±0.15g under the vibration of the conveyor belt.
In order to adapt to new packaging such as square and hexagonal bottles that customers may introduce in the future, PLY-PACK has designed a modular flexible production line:
· The quick-change interface at the end of the robot arm supports 5 types of filling heads
· The adjustable range of the flow channel pressure is expanded to 0.5-6bar
· The HMI interface is preset with Arabic/English bilingual switching
This design allows customers to complete the production line switching in just 4 hours when adding rose honey products after half a year, saving 87% of the adjustment time compared to traditional equipment.
Today, conical honey bottles with the "Made in Yemen" label have entered channels such as Carrefour in France and Metro in Germany. The customer's annual export volume jumped from 400 tons to 2,100 tons, and the product premium increased by 30%. Adil said at the commissioning ceremony: "This filling machine is not only filling honey, but also the technical voice of the Middle East manufacturing industry."
PLY-PACK's engineering team did not stop there. They are developing the next generation of zero-error filling technology, aiming to compress the accuracy to ±0.05g - equivalent to the weight of a drop of honey. This war on accuracy is redefining the industrial standards of global food packaging.
