Canning line for Heineken in Seville

For the turnkey project in the Spanish city of Seville, built for a total investment of around 320 million euros, Krones was asked to supply six filling lines in all. With a canning line, bottling lines for returnable and non-returnable glass, and integration of the entire filling and packaging technology in a higher-order Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Krones has delivered the entire filling and packaging technology required in this greenfield project, where every day in three-shift operation up to six million bottles and 2.1 million cans are being filled.

The canning line, rated at 90,000 cans an hour, is centred around a Volumetic VOC can filler.

Salient features of the Volumetic VOC:

• its very high filling accuracy, made possible by predosing the fill quantity in a metering chamber. This renders the filling function independent of the product’s bubble-sensitivity or foaming characteristics, so that high filling speeds can be safely achieved.
• the option for adjusting the fill quantity even during the filling function, both in the filler as a whole and at individual filling valves
• fast system change-over, since the machine is adjusted to handle different products and cans in the control system software, without requiring any manipulations at the filling valve itself.

The line is supplied by a Pressant Universal sweep-off depalletiser; after the cans have been filled, they are pasteurised in a Sander Hansen double-deck pasteuriser, before being passed to a Variopac FS machine, where the 0.33-l and 0.5-l cans are packed in shrink-packs.