Espresso Chat: Filling and Sealing Milk Bottles

In an age of information overload, sometimes you just want a quick jolt of just-the-basics. That's why we started this "Espresso Chat" blog series — a quick 200-words-or-less article that touches on a little bit of everything from products and technologies to industry news. Today, we bring you a shot-sized application story about our [ PRT2 ] precision ring and track solutions.

PROBLEM: How do you fill and cap milk bottles quickly for long hours under varied load conditions? This customer processes milk bottles every hour of the day except for short breaks to clean the track system, and the team needed a curvilinear motion setup that could run at high speeds and withstand corrosion. Less downtime, more up-time.

SOLUTION: PRT2 by HepcoMotion exclusively from Bishop-Wisecarver proved to be a perfect fit — after customization, you can "fit and forget" because the product keeps neat and tidy using its self-cleaning vee-groove linear guide wheels. This curvilinear track fills and seals 12,000 quarter-liter to two-liter bottles an hour. That's thirty linked carriages shuffling bottles at a rate of 1.4 meters a second with 5-meter-per-second acceleration around curves. The track is 1,800mm long with a curve diameter of 318mm, and because it's stainless steel, the motion system holds up well in a food processing environment like this one.

MAKE IT A DOUBLE: Check out this video we created of a robotic gaming chair that uses a ring and track system to swivel and rotate a seat in sync with the player's game — super cool!