DIY Volumetric Bottle Filler

jacksonbrown

They needed valving too. We basically built a piston pump.

Kapea

Two check valves per cylinder would do it.

jacksonbrown

True, we used auto changeover valves for some reason. I think to recirculate to prevent the lines solidifying.

It was a bit more like this (but with extra valves for purge and recirc).

assuming it works and keeps working, I think grims solution is much more elegant.

grim

I don't see how a piston is going to be more accurate.

If your piston stroke is variable to allow for different fill volumes, you are going to need a highly accurate positioner/actuator - and now you've got error. Likewise, it doesn't eliminate variability due to temperature.

In addition, now you need a precision cylinder with fancy seals, etc.

Easier and more accurate, I think, is by weight.

Gram scale with +-1 gram accuracy, and a simplistic filler consisting of a diaphragm pump and solenoid.

But, you add in complexity with having to automatically tare the bottle weight for every fill.

I could see people claiming that piston fillers are much more gentle to the very delicate spirit. Less injection of oxygen, since the fill process would be significantly less violent.

Kapea

Two verticle glass cylinders side by side, two piston rods connected to a threaded teeter-totter arm, connected to one drive shaft. As one cyliner fills the other dispenses. Weigh the output at startup and adjust the piston rod connections to desired stroke volume based on density of the spirit at today's temperature. Individual bottle tare is irrelevant.

Temperature is akways going to be a factor. I'm sure the TTB has a volume at a standard temperature spec. Once you know the density of your spirit at that standard temp, temp becomes irrelevant for the most part. You'll know how much your spirit weighs at standard temp. At startup set your stroke, once per piston to deliver that weight.

The driveshaft rotation is the coarse tuning for various bottle sizes. Driveshaft rotation recipricating, controled by a perpendicularly mounted solenoid with an adjustable plunger.

Or something like that...

jacksonbrown

Sounds like a lot of fab. One benefit to the one we did was it was all air powered.
If the timer was based on a micro controller you could even add a temp probe to the supply line and add in an automatic expansion compensation.

richard

I saw a supplier the other day whom had a piece of equipment that made me think in the other direction as to how I do bottle filling. It is a form of volumetric filling and am looking to explore this project further.

So some general questions for viability;

1. How fast would you require a single 750ml bottle to be filled. I would have gone for somewhere between 10 seconds and max 15 seconds.
2. What is the acceptable fill tolerance on a for example 750ml bottle. (ml tolerance).
3. What total rate of bottles per hour is acceptable. Small distillery requirement.
4. What would be an acceptable price to pay for a 2 head unit, 3 head unit and 4 head unit.

grim

Our diy 4 head filler - which runs 2 by 2 (2 are filling while you are loading the opposite 2, reverse, repeat). 22 seconds for 2 bottles. 6 bottles in a little over a minute if you are pushing it. But on average, 240-300 per hour is reasonable.

A single person doing hand corking can keep up with the person bottling, but tamper seal/shrink and labeling can't keep up. Using capsules and a shrink machine, perhaps a single person per operation line could be able to keep up. Or, two people with heat guns. But then the bottleneck is labeling. We use a Race, you could probably push faster, but at the risk of error, which is a real pain. Buying two labelers and additional label rolls? Not likely. Automatic labeler is big bucks.

A fill rate of 10-15 seconds per fill cycle (2, 3 or 4 bottles) - the crew would never be able to keep up with the bottling machine running 4 heads. Even 2 heads would be 8 bottles per minute, which is faster than my 5-6.

Either 2 or 4 heads, 3 heads makes no sense at all unless you are an octopus - I don't have 3 arms.

richard

Thanks. It is very much what I thought.

Fill tolerance ..... +- ml ????

Labellers are a bitch. When we package in our cider plant, we presently hand label a thousand bottles at a time, and it looks simply put .... shit.

Just waiting for some bucks to come in towards year end and then I will buy an entry level labeller. I bought an ink jet marker last christmas for our batch marking.

The entry level labeller is approx USD 7,700

grim

I'd imagine it's a bigger issue for fruit/seasonal based manufacturers, where you are attempting to bottle a massive amount of product in a short window of time.

Doing a thousand every day would get old pretty quickly, but at those kinds of volumes, $7k for a label machine is cheap.

CothermanDistilling

I bought the primera ap362 labeler for the distillery after attending a couple bottling parties at a local brewer of belgian beers (bottled still, with priming sugar)... a thousand labels in 3 hours no problem... one bottle washer, one person running 4-head gravity level filler, 1 or two corking, 1 wrapping the wire hoods, one labeling, one running around supplying cases, cleaning up, etc...

PRIMERA AP362 Label Applicator

I use flip top bottles, ans want the label centered on the bail of the flip-top, so I put a hole in the side of the machine and mounted up a movable pointer wire to know when to hit the foot pedal to apply the label.)

richard

???? summationtechnology ...... seems blocked / banned

RobertS

We run with a Primera ap362 on the brewery side as well, and are finally getting rolled labels for the distillery. Highly recommend as an entry level beyond hand labeling.

CothermanDistilling

@richard said: ???? summationtechnology ...... seems blocked / banned

works fine here, maybe your ISP thinks it's porn?

richard

The Primera looks great. Summation still tells me forbidden.

punkin

Link works fine for me in Australia.

Telluride

I purchased an automated system from china that actually works really well. It is very similar to the cheap-o fillers on sleebay, except that it has a conveyor. We did build a separate fill box for the system that uses a pump and float to keep the gravitational level the same for the filler, which has made it dead on accurate. This pump pushes through a plate/frame filler to filter the product, making the process simplified as well. The filler uses 4 pumps for 4 filling heads through what i presume is a rheostat, ultimately controlled by a timer. If i push it to the max, 4 bottles in 20 seconds, or 720 bottles(a full pallet) in 1 hour. Of course labeling and case packing cannot keep up to that, so we do a pallet of 750s in 2 hours, we just got a truck load of 200ml plastic flasks, we will see how long a pallet of that takes in the next week or two. I am very happy with this bottler, if I remember correctly it was maybe $4k shipped, but i could be wrong, ocean packing is the company.

crozdog

Telluride, is this sit? OPH-IIII-A:table top automatic filling machine with 4heads

EZiTasting

Pardon the intrusion, but why not fill by using volume as a measure?

I've not had to concern myself with this issue but it would seem that is you sell a product at a volume, then surely you'd meter it out in the same measure!?!

Given that both weight and volume is affected by ambient temperatures, why is volume not the first option? Just curious...

HadlerDistillations

@EZiTasting, I'm not one to usually post, but weight is not affected by temperature, only volume i.e as temperature increases, an amount of liquid will increase in volume, but its weight will not change. The weight of the liquid is a product of mass and gravity. With this in mind, it would be more accurate and repeatable to fill via weight as this would remain constant regardless of ambient temperature. The alternative would be to fill by volume at a specific and consistent temperature.

grim

We fill by volume using a volumetric filler, however we calibrate fill by weight, not volume.

750ml of 80 proof is 712 grams, for example.

grim

EZiTasting

Ok, confused density with weight, I guess. Rito, now it makes sense.

blackdiamond

@grim said: Volumetric fill ain't perfect, level fill ain't perfect. We know what's perfect, do it by weight into bottles with an impeccable tolerance, but that's a whole 'nother issue.

You do bring up a good point, and it's real (see all the way at the bottom). But, you can buy standardized orifice and swage them, or press fit, in the tube, they aren't expensive, although sourcing might take a couple of hours.

But that doesn't change the fact that the volume will differ based on the temperature of the liquid, and the atmospheric pressure. Which means even given a standardized orifice, you'd still need to correct across extremes. Bottling a chill filtered spirit that is sitting at 60f is going to be different from bottling from a tank at 84f (it's a hot day). Likewise, bottling during a hurricane going to require different settings from a cold dry winter day.

Not to mention the elephant in the room, the diaphragm pump stroke. Even with super precision timers like the Omron and others (which are accurate to .01 second), the problem is that you can only be accurate (really) to a diaphragm stroke, depending on where the stroke starts/stops, and the flapper position, all that jazz.

I did consider using a Cole Parmer lab metering diaphragm pump. They have a system that has feedback on the specific stroke, so you dial in the exact number of pump strokes needed to get to your dispensing volume. It dispenses the exact number of strokes every time. This would be much more accurate, as plumbing and orifice details are irrelevant.

(Last note - when you use rotating pipe cutter, you actually make an orifice smaller than the pipe diameter - you do actually need to true the pipe diameters or you'll get fill variation).

What kind of tip did you use to spray inside the bottles or is it just the 1/4" stainless open with no nozzle? Thanks.

grim

No spray, it's just open tubing.

One fill tube per solenoid. We made the mistake of attempting to split the solenoid output into two nozzles with a tee. That has been more headache than it's worth. It would have been significantly easier just using 4 solenoids connected to the 2 timers.

blackdiamond

@grim said: No spray, it's just open tubing.

One fill tube per solenoid. We made the mistake of attempting to split the solenoid output into two nozzles with a tee. That has been more headache than it's worth. It would have been significantly easier just using 4 solenoids connected to the 2 timers.

So I should pick up two more solenoids to keep it as a 4 bottle filler.... Thanks for all the info and photos, I have all the parts, now to just put it all together.

grim

Yeah, 4 solenoids for 4 heads.