Les Hunt borrows a legendary marketing line to describe the impressive
automated canning and bottling operations at Carlsberg's brewery in
Northampton
In addition to brewing a variety of lager beers on site, Carlsberg UK's
brewery in Northampton is something of a bottling and canning hub for the
products of other UK-based brewing companies, as well as those from its
brewery in Leeds. The bottling and canning installations at Northampton
are of a scale sufficient to meet a filling operation that shifts 900
bottles per minute and 3,000 cans per minute across one bottling line and
two separate canning lines into a variety of secondary packaging, shrink
wrapping and palletising operations. It certainly has the biggest drives
installation of any plant visited by DPA in recent years.
I was taken around the bottling and canning lines by utility engineering
manager, Ian Doggett, who walked me up and down row upon row of yellow
cabinets containing Danfoss VLT 5000 series drives. Danfoss is
Carlsberg's preferred drives supplier, and not just because of the Danish
connection. Firstly, as Mr Doggett explained, a standard product
installed throughout the plant is easier to maintain, there's less
training required and a technician is able to work on any section - be it
pasteuriser, filler, conveyor or kegging line. Secondly, the VLTs have
proved to be very reliable and when problems have been encountered,
Danfoss has responded rapidly and effectively. The company also provides
regular training and product updates for the Carlsberg technical team.
Although an exact figure wasn't forthcoming, Mr Doggett intimated that
there were in excess of 700 inverters installed throughout the plant, the
majority in the range 0.75 to 3kW controlling the conveyor geared motor
drives (mostly SEW Eurodrive units). Larger inverters are installed to
control motors associated with the pasteuriser, fillers and some process
pumps. The main control parameters for the conveyors are line speed and
torque at start-up, with acceleration and deceleration ramps at start and
stop.
Playing with numbers
The total volume of Carlsberg UK is 3,500,000 brewer's barrels (bbs). If
you put all this volume into cans and then stack them side by side, the
line would stretch from Northampton to Copenhagen 65 times.
It would provide everyone who watched the Rugby World Cup Final in Sydney
(an estimated 110,000 people) 12,000 cans of beer each.
Carlsberg's total trade volume is 1,700,000 bbs - enough to give 40 cans
of Carlsberg to each of the estimated 16 million people that watched the
return of 'Dirty Den' to the BBC's 'East Enders'
The conveyors are sectionalised, with one geared motor driving each
section under inverter control. The strategy is to 'mass' the filled cans
and bottles, such that they stand fully abreast of the conveyor belt as
they approach the final packaging operation and this requires a great
deal of speed synchronisation between the conveyor sections. An important
target is to keep the bottles and cans upright - no mean feat when you
have tens of thousands of moving bottles and cans on the lines at any one
moment.
The drives are marshalled centrally with respect to whichever bottling or
canning line they control, and the cabling lengths are kept to a minimum.
A Profibus-DP fieldbus is also installed throughout the brewery.
The majority of materials handling systems at Northampton were installed
in stages by the German company, Krones. The oldest is canning line one,
which has been operating for five years and the most recent, at 12
months, is canning line two. The bottling line has been in operation for
three years. For more information about Carlsberg in the UK and its
products, visit www.carlsberg.co.uk
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