New Era
KHS presents the innovative filler platform for glass bottles / Not only the technology of the new, innovative glass bottle filler concept Innofill Glass by KHS is the Best of the Best. What’s more important is that the optimized Hygienic Design concept will give the companies who use it direct competitive advantages. These include improved filling quality and considerable cost reductions. For technicians and businessmen alike, this is the stuff of dreams.
Our head …
French writer, painter and graphic artist Francis Picabia (1879 to 1953) discovered, “… our head is round so our thinking can change direction.” The master was looking far ahead into the twenty-first century. Because, as Michael Batz, dramatic adviser and light artist from Hamburg (Reichstag, Speicherstadt Hamburg), put it, for some time already, “it is not either/or exclusivities, individual highlights or more or less rigid systems what matter. Thinking today is formed by plurality, controllability that should be as easy as possible, time management and the ability to communicate combined with low energy consumption and high efficiency.”
It’s about secured product quality and protection of the consumer
In addition, and as the basis of all considerations, KHS focuses constantly on the customer in its market. What are the latter’s requirements? What does the customer need from a technological and economic perspective? How does the customer gain a lasting competitive advantage through KHS technology and services? These were exactly the questions the developers in the KHS group asked themselves when they worked on an innovative system for glass filling lines, which is now ready for operation. The focus here: hygienic design and automation. Competitive companies regard hygienic design as a major criterion for lowering costs in production. Above all, however, it is about secured product quality and protection of the consumer, but also about health at work for the own staff.
Until now, beverage machine engineering normally optimized many individual components in terms of hygienic design without considering the adjacent machine parts. Problems: Optimizing, modernizing, and changing over existing designs always reach limits and obstacles – as long as the basic design needs to be preserved. Hygienic design thus remained piecemeal. Solution: the complete redesign of a filler line in that all design steps focus on the hygienic design aspect from the beginning without any regard of currently existing components. The team put everything to the test, reassessed every detail and eventually implemented the knowledge gained in innovative systems.
The result is a platform-based machine concept as we find in the automotive industry. There, a platform defines the common technical basic concept, and the functions of the different models are oriented towards that basic concept. The definition at KHS is similar. A technical basis is now available that the different computer-controlled KHS filling systems are built on and that takes the respective individual criteria of the specific filling methods into account. The first filler for the KHS Innofill Glass platform system is the DRS-ZMS pressure filling system used for bottling beer. Other filling systems for soft drinks, water, wine, sparkling wine, and spirits will follow. KHS thus heralds a generation change in filling machines for glass bottles that offers a wide range of benefits, such as an even better filling quality, higher line availability, and reduced cost of maintenance, power, water, and cleaning agents. This is achieved primarily thanks to the use of modern and lubricant-free components with optimized wear behavior, which KHS has developed in close cooperation with its highly specialized partners.