Gentle and flexible palletising

The Reh Kendermann GmbH winery ranks among the largest and most sophisticated in Germany. At its production facility in Bingen, over 50 million bottles of wine are filled each year on two existing Krones lines, for export to more than 80 different countries around the globe.
The diverse multiplicity of high-quality wines, bottles and dress variants is reflected not least in the requirement for having 57 different palletising programmes retrievable, and this at a speed of more than 25,000 bph at the palletiser.
Another requirement for the concept of the new palletising centre was that the wine cartons be palletised with extremely gentle movements to avoid damages of the cartons and the labels on the bottles. The individual cartons had to be turned in non-contact mode for grouping the layer.
The Multiturner turning station, which can also be used for handling shrink-wrapped packs holding non-returnable PET bottles, turns the cartons to suit the layer pattern involved, until they are all aligned in the desired direction of travel. The turning movement is created by different rotation of the conveyor rollers. Downstream of the two Multiturners, the cartons are fed into the palletiser.
Reh Kendermann has been successfully using the Krones 3A Robot as a packer for years already. So it didn’t take long to decide that the two new palletisers would also be Krones Robot 3A models with a column in rotary design, enabling the machine to handle heavy layers. Thanks to the compact dimensions and the large action radius, the palletisers can be integrated in a space-saving machine layout. A full-pallet labeller provides fully automated recording of all bottled and palletised wines.