It’s for a school project. It will be controlled through PLC
My fist though was to make a conveyor belt that stops whenever the bottle is underneath the filler valve (well, not all of a sudden because the bottle will fall over). Then the belt keeps going until it goes underneath tha capper. Once it is sealed, the band continues and a pneumatic cylinder knocks the bottle over. The bottle then reaches the right edge of the belt, and rolls through a ramp where the bottles will be piled up.
Something like this:
http://img.imageshack.us/img//z.png
There are only a few weeks left before I have to finish that project, but I have no clue on where to start. Does somebody have a better idea for the water bottling machine? Does somebody know what’s needed?
Thanks in advance.
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simple bottle molding machine consists of: molds, compressor, hoses, heater
The process they use to fill any kind of bottle is pretty elaborate and made for mass production. You would have a very expensive and busy two weeks trying to mimic how they fill those water bottles.
One thing is the conveyor belt never stops to fill a product. What happens is the bottle goes into a carrousel and a pair of electric eyes line up the bottle top and a filler hose with a volumetric pump begins to fill the bottle as it starts its run thru the carrousel and the filler spigot turns right with the bottle all the way thru a degree arc and stops after putting in the oz or whatever of water.
There might be filler spigots on the carrousel so bottles are getting filled without the line ever stopping. After the bottles exit the carrousel they get lined up with a steel chute that holds the brace ridge of plastic just under the cap. The caps are dropped on the bottle tops and a little spinning friction plate comes down and spins it hard. It pushes down also because the bottle caps have those safety tamper rims on them and they have to be pushed over a ridge on the bottle with quite a force.
Then a packaging machine lines up the bottles in rows to fill the cardboard case. A little suction gripper grabs all bottles at once and lays them in a cardboard tray and then plastic is shot over them and vacuumed formed
And that is just one way…there are many different kinds.
For something to do in two weeks you got to make it super easy and slow output.Maybe like a very slow conveyor that stops to be filled, where a electric eye stops the conveyor and you use a gallon bucket of water with a aquarium water pump with a PVC plastic pipe that is just above your bottle opening, that is turned on by your PLC for just the amount of time needed to fill the bottle then stops pumping. Then another electric eye notices the water stops and advances the next bottle to start the procedure all over again.
As the bottle that gets filled moves on to be replaced by a new bottle, then the next station is where you drop a cap on the bottle and have a PLC turn the cap the amount of rotations needed to seal with a rubber friction cup. You can have the conveyor run up to a wood table that is boxed to accept maybe a pack, so the conveyor would push the bottles into a pack shape and then you could drop a pre-made plastic ring that would hold the bottles or bottles together
Speaking of you tube look at this page of bottle filling machines for some ideas:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bottle…
A better idea might be to arrange the bottles on a carousel with an array of wire brackets that hold each bottle upright. The mechanism on which the carousel moves could be detented so it automatically stops each bottle under the filler, gets filled, and then stops again under the capper. Imagine how the cylinder of a revolver operates. The rotary motion of the carousel would stop each bottle precisely under the filler and capper and the brackets would support them so they wouldn’t topple. After each bottle was capped, the carousel could rotate to a point where there was no bottom to the carousel and the bottle would fall through the bracket to some sort of conveyor that would carry the filled capped bottles to a station where they would be placed into to cases. After each bottle falls from the carousel, the carousel would advance to a new position where another empty bottle would drop from a chute into the vacated bracket.
Visit a water bottling plant and see how they do it.