EP0309929A1 - Arrangement for raising a container in a beverage bottling installation - Google Patents

Abstract

A piston/cylinder raising arrangement for raising and pressing a container against the filling member of a beverage bottling installation is designed with vacuum impingement.

Description

The invention relates to a lifting arrangement of the type mentioned in the preamble of claim 1.

In today's preferred design, a larger number of filling elements are arranged all around in beverage filling devices. The containers are inserted at a lower level on a stand under the assigned filling element, whereby they must be freely movable below the filling element below it. Then the containers are filled individually for filling and pressed against the container edge direction of the filling element with the required contact pressure, which depends on the container pressure, the edge surface and the filling weight. The containers are then lowered again and transported out of the beverage filling device.

For lifting and pressing, lifting arrangements of the type mentioned at the outset are known, each of which, associated with a filling member, provide a piston / cylinder lifting arrangement with which the containers are both raised and lowered and can be kept pressed during the filling process.

In the generic state of technology, several embodiments are possible. The piston / cylinder lifting arrangements can be designed to be reversible for lifting and lowering, so that the lifting and lowering movements are controlled by pressure medium. The construction preferred in the current state of the art, however, provides for constant pressurization of the medium in the stroke direction, whereby pressure is pressed down against the constantly applied lifting force by mechanical means, preferably with control cams, at the intended circulation points of the beverage filling device. With this construction, loss of pressure medium is avoided.

Furthermore, the piston / cylinder lifting arrangements can be provided both in a "hanging" and in a "standing" configuration. When standing, the stationary part of the piston / cylinder lifting arrangement (piston or cylinder) is at the bottom and is attached to a height-fixed part of the beverage filling device. With this design, the entire piston / cylinder stroke arrangement is usually located under the container. In the hanging design, the fixed part of the piston / cylinder lifting arrangement lies at the top and is connected there to a height-fixed part of the beverage filling device. Here the container "hangs" on the piston / cylinder lifting arrangement.

With regard to the supporting attack of the lifting arrangement on the container, there are essentially two possibilities. On the one hand, the container can stand on a plate moved by the lifting arrangement. On the other hand, pliers moved by the lifting arrangement are known which act in the neck area of the bottle and are particularly preferred for pressure-sensitive plastic bottles.

In this described prior art, to which the invention relates, it is known to apply excess pressure to the piston / cylinder lifting arrangement, for which purpose compressed air is generally used. This has the disadvantage in the case of beverage filling devices that compressed air, which is otherwise not required in the case of beverage filling devices, must be provided separately for these purposes. This requires separate compressed air generators, which increases the installation costs. In addition, there is the disadvantage that, in the case of the hanging arrangement which is usually preferred for spatial constructive reasons, a more complicated piston / cylinder construction results when pressurized. In a standing arrangement, a simple piston / cylinder construction can be used with only one seal on the piston circumference. In the case of a hanging arrangement, however, an inverted construction is required, in which the passage of the piston rod must also be sealed by the cylinder bottom, that is to say two seals are required.

The object of the present invention is therefore to create a lifting arrangement of the type mentioned at the outset which is structurally simpler and less expensive.

This object is achieved according to the characterizing part of claim 1 in that the lifting arrangement is subjected to a vacuum.

This initially has the advantage that the compressed air supply is saved and a vacuum pump is required for this, which is the case with most beverages kefüleinrichtung is present anyway. This applies in particular to vacuum fillers. However, vacuum is also usually used in counterpressure beverage fillers in order to pre-evacuate the containers before filling. In such beverage filling devices, vacuum generation is present anyway and can be used for the purposes according to the invention without significant additional construction, so that considerable savings result. The piston / cylinder lifting arrangements, apart from the reverse direction of action, only need to be reconstructed to an insignificant extent. According to the state of the art, compressed air with a pressure of usually 3 bar is used. If you switch to vacuum with a negative pressure of about 1 bar, you only need to increase the diameter of the cylinder by about a factor of 1.7, which hardly occurs in terms of costs. Another major advantage is that in the reverse direction of action of the vacuum application, the hanging arrangement is the simpler, namely single-acting construction. In the case of piston / cylinder lifting arrangements subjected to vacuum, the hanging version preferred from other spatial design requirements is the simpler version, so that there are further considerable cost advantages.

The lifting arrangement is therefore advantageously arranged in a hanging manner.

The features of claim 3 are also advantageously provided. In the case of the significantly lower differential pressures between the cylinder space and the environment when the vacuum is applied, the seal of the piston in the cylinder and, if necessary, the piston rod seal can be designed as a friction-free gap seal. At the lower differential pressures, the resulting vacuum is losses insignificant. However, the simpler seal construction results in significant cost advantages.

Finally, the features of claim 4 are advantageously provided. As a result, a simple rotation lock is achieved in a known manner, as is generally required in the case of lifting arrangements of the type mentioned at the outset.

• Figur 1 eine Hubanordnung hängender Ausführung mit feststehendem Kolben,
• Figur 2 eine Hubanrodnung hängender Ausführung mit feststehendem Zylinder,
• Figur 3 eine Hubanordnung stehende Ausführung mit feststehendem Zylinder und
• Figur 4 eine Hubanordnung stehender Ausführung mit feststehendem Kolben.

In the drawing, the invention is shown for example and schematically. Show it:

• FIG. 1 shows a suspended lifting arrangement with a fixed piston,
• FIG. 2 shows a lifting arrangement with a hanging cylinder,
• Figure 3 is a lifting arrangement standing version with a fixed cylinder and
• Figure 4 is a lifting arrangement of standing design with a fixed piston.

FIG. 1 shows a filling element 1 with a container edge seal 2, shown schematically as a rubber ring, on its underside, against which a container 2, in the illustrated case a bottle, is to be lifted from below and pressed with its edge.

The filling element 1 is fastened with several other identical filling elements on the outside to a circumferential support ring 4, which is shown in a section through the axis of rotation of the revolving beverage filling device arranged to the right of the filling element in the drawing plane. The near the filler For the sake of simplicity, the ring bowl provided in the usual design is omitted.

The container 3 stands on a lifting plate 5, which is connected via a lifting rod 6 to the bottom of a cylinder 7 open on the upper side. The cylinder 7 is guided in the stroke direction on a piston 8, the piston rod 9 of which is attached to the filling element 1 or the support ring 4 via an arm 10. The piston rod 9 is hollow up to the piston head and connected to a vacuum line 11, which leads in a suitable manner to a vacuum supply, preferably to a vacuum ring line 12, which rotates with the support ring 4 around the beverage filling device and also the piston / cylinder arrangements of the remaining filling elements and for other purposes, for example for container pre-evacuation. With a vacuum filler, the vacuum can be obtained from the ring bowl.

The cylinder space between the piston 8 and the bottom of the cylinder 7 is constantly subjected to vacuum in the embodiment shown, the effective piston surface being provided in a suitable size for the required contact pressure. The container 3 is thus constantly pressed upwards against the filling element 1 with contact pressure. For lowering, a roller 13 is provided in a known manner on the lifting linkage 6, which runs under a lowering curve 14 and is pressed downwards by the latter. The lowering curve 14 rotates around the bottom of the beverage device with different heights and presses the lifting rod 6 with the cylinder 7 downward against the vacuum force in the piston / cylinder arrangement 8, 7 for lowering the container 3.

In a different embodiment, the vacuum line 11 can also be provided with a valve, which only provides for vacuuming for the purpose of lifting and pressing, but ventilates the cylinder space for lowering.

Instead of holding the container 3 on a lifting plate 5, in the case of a bottle with a suitable neck design, the container can also be held on the neck with a fork 15 shown in dashed lines, which is connected to the lifting rod 6 via the linkage shown in dashed lines. The lifting plate 5 is omitted in this embodiment, which is particularly suitable for flexible plastic bottles.

In the figures 2 to 4 construction variants are shown, which differ essentially only in the design of the piston / cylinder lifting arrangement. The same construction details are provided with the same reference numerals as in the embodiment of FIG. 1. For the sake of simplicity in the drawing, the vacuum ring line 12, which may be provided, is omitted, as is the ring tank which is usually provided. The construction variant with the fork 15 of the embodiment of FIG. 1 is also omitted in the remaining figures for the sake of simplicity.

In the embodiment in FIG. 2, only pistons and cylinders are interchanged compared to that in FIG. The cylinder 27 is fixedly attached to the arm 10, while the piston 28 is attached to the lifting rod 6. The vacuum line 11 opens into the bottom of the cylinder 27. The same function can be seen as in the embodiment in FIG. 1.

In the embodiments of Figures 1 and 2 acts it concerns design options of the so-called hanging version, in which the piston / cylinder lifting arrangement with its fixed part (piston 8 in FIG. 1 or cylinder 27 in FIG. 2) is fastened to the filling element 1, while the lifting rod 6 hangs on the moving part.
Construction variants of a standing piston / cylinder lifting arrangement are shown in FIGS. 3 and 4.

Figure 3 shows a variant with a fixed cylinder 37, which is arranged below the container 3 and is fixedly connected to a lower support ring 34 of the beverage filling device, which is connected to the upper support ring 4 via a plurality of rods 35.

The cylinder 37 is open at the bottom. The piston 38 is guided in the cylinder and, with the piston rod 39 carrying the lifting rod 6, passes through the bottom of the cylinder 37, in which the vacuum line 11 also opens.

For this embodiment, the variant with the reverse arrangement of piston and cylinder is shown in Figure 4. Here, the piston 48 is fastened with its piston rod 49 to the lower support ring 34, while the bottom of the cylinder 47 is sealingly guided on the piston rod 39, there also has the connection of the vacuum line 11 and carries the lifting plate 5 at its upper end. The cylinder is open at 41 there. In this embodiment, the roller 13 actuated by the lowering curve 14 is fastened to the cylinder 47 via an arm 42.

As a comparison of Figures 1 and 2 (hanging arrangement) and 3 and 4 (standing arrangement) shows, is with a vacuum-actuated piston / cylinder stroke order the hanging arrangement easier, since it only requires a piston seal, while two piston seals are required in the standing arrangement, one on the piston circumference and the other on the piston rod. Since the hanging arrangement is usually preferred for other design reasons, a simpler piston / cylinder construction can be used for this preferred hanging arrangement when the vacuum is applied than in the case of overpressurized piston / cylinder lifting arrangements in which the hanging arrangement is the more complicated with additional sealing required the piston rod is.

In the illustrated embodiments of the invention, the sealing of the piston and cylinder has not been discussed in detail. Conventional seals with plastic ring seals can be used here. However, simple sliding seals, preferably gap seals with a certain amount of play, can be used, which are structurally very simple and, at the low differential pressures of maximum 1 bar between the vacuum in the cylinder and the ambient air, result in only slight vacuum losses, while in the case of conventional piston / cylinder stroke arrangements subjected to overpressure that work with significantly higher differential pressures, such simple seals can hardly be used due to the resulting pressure medium losses.

In the illustrated embodiments of FIGS. 1 to 4, another problem of such lifting arrangements has not been dealt with in more detail, namely the correct guidance of the lifting rod 6, which must have vertical guides at a suitable point, which prevent the piston and cylinder from rotating around the container 3 to be precisely aligned under the filling element 1. Because of the simplification of the drawing such guides are not shown in Figures 1 to 4. They can be replaced by a non-circular design of the piston and cylinder, for example with a square cross-sectional area, which makes additional guides unnecessary.

Claims (4)

1. Piston / cylinder lifting arrangement for lifting and pressing a container against the filling element of a beverage filling device, characterized in that the lifting arrangement (7, 8; 27, 28; 37, 38; 47, 48) is acted upon by vacuum. 2. Lifting arrangement according to claim 1, characterized in that the lifting arrangement (7, 8; 27, 28) is formed hanging. 3. Lifting arrangement according to one of the preceding claims, characterized in that the piston seals are designed as gap seals. 4. Lifting arrangement according to one of the preceding claims; characterized in that the cylinder cross section is non-circular.

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