Individually Timed Fill Heads Help Fillers Reach Accurate Volumes

Liquid fillers using a gravity principle to get product to bottles does not rely on pumps or other components to move product. Instead, gravity fillers hold product in a tank over the fill heads. Once bottles are in position under the nozzles, valves will open on the fill heads to allow product to flow from the tank into the bottles for a set amount of time. Nothing more than the force of gravity is used to move the liquid.

Times on automatic gravity fillers will typically be set on a touchscreen operator interface prior to running production. While some gravity filling machines may simply allow for one time for all fill heads on the machine, Liquid Packaging Solutions allows the operator of the machine to set the fill time for each individual head to allow for greater volumetric accuracy.

As product flows from the tank through flexible hose, then through the fill heads into waiting containers, flow rate may vary slightly through the pathway of each head. By allowing for individual times for each fill head, the already accurate gravity filler becomes even slightly more accurate for the volumetric target. This is especially helpful for liquid products that must hit an accurate volume in each bottle or container that is filled.

Using the operator interface, operators can set the valve open time for each head, which may vary slightly from head to head. For instance, a six head filler may need 12 seconds to fill each bottle. Operators can then adjust each fill head slightly from that 12 second time to ensure each bottle is being filled accurately. Slight differences in fill time may, for example, be necessary simply due to the way the flexible hose runs from the gravity filler tank to the fill head, as hoses and fill heads will not sit in exactly the same position for each head.

As for set up of the machine, individually setting each fill head may seem time consuming. However, the operator interface for the gravity filler will allow an operator to set the time for all fill heads in addition to each individual fill head. To make it even more simple, once this process has been completed once for a product and bottle combination, the operator can save a recipe to the interface, allowing the time settings to be recalled each time that same combination is run in production. Even easier, Liquid Packaging Solutions will set the times for all bottle and product combinations when the bottles and products are provided to LPS for testing. This means upon delivery of the equipment to the production floor, the operator of the machine need only call up the recipe with the press of a button on the operator interface.

Gravity filling machines are typically used in packaging projects that use free-flowing, lower viscosity products requiring an accurate volumetric fill. LPS offers other filling machine principles for thicker products, products that need to be filled to a specific level, product that need to be filled by weight and more. Contact LPS for more information on gravity filling machines or any of the other packaging machinery manufactured in the LPS plant.