Preheating and cooling glass bottles

A large-scale manufacturer of returnable glass beverage bottles was looking for a way to avoid or reduce the wear marks around glass bottles in order to achieve a longer bottle lifetime and, as a result, allow glass bottles to be re-used more frequently.

The idea was to distribute a fluid uniformly over the outside of the bottles after the cleaning process that would then harden quickly. To this end, we built a machine in which the bottles are first heated to a temperature of 200 °C using an LE-R air heater. The fluid is then applied and cooled to become solid. What was important here was to ensure a consistent and very precise sequence of the individual steps. First, a smaller test installation was built to enable us to carry out various tests. After completion of the test phase, the installation was built in its final large format.