Case Packer for Eco-Flat Wine Bottles

Fast, Compact & Versatile

An Australian winery was preparing to launch a new brand of organic wines, to be packaged in an innovative flat bottle made from 100% recycled PET plastic. These recycled bottles require 75% less energy to produce and emit 79% less CO2 than virgin PET.

They needed a machine to pack the bottles into cases. But there was a twist: the case packer had to also work with their existing traditional round wine bottles! Hamson Machinery came up with the solution: use a standard Hamson Overpacker ST wine case packer, fitted with a removable collation system dedicated to the eco-flat bottle.
For round bottles (ranging from 50mm to 110mm in diameter), the standard ‘flooded’ collation system was used to group the bottles into lanes, upstream from the packer. Partitions could be inserted at a station mounted to the upstream multi-lane conveyor.

For the flat bottle, special lane guides were fitted to the upstream conveyor to guide a single row of flat bottles into the packer. These guides were designed to stop the narrow unstable bottles from toppling sideways. Inside the packer, a segmented collator was fitted (removed for the round bottles). After a single row of flat bottles filled into the collator, the collator shifted sideways, allowing the next row to fill in. This was repeated until the bottles were grouped into four rows, ready to be transferred to the pack station.