Like all German breweries, the Gilde brewery in Hanover is struggling with the massive increase in the proportion of foreign bottles. With its "NovaSort" system, Langenhagen-based Novatec offers a completely new type of sorting system and also operates this customised solution itself.
In 1546, the Hanoverian brewers founded their own guild, which has watched over the rights and duties of the brewers belonging to it since 1609. In 1870, the current site was taken over by the guild association, which was transformed into a company. From 1970, one of the most modern breweries in the world was built there, which, for reasons of tradition, supplied individual catering establishments with horse-drawn carts until the 1990s. After many eventful years, Gilde has been a private brewery again since the beginning of 2016 as a newly founded limited company within the medium-sized TCB brewery group.
In the meantime, output has recovered significantly, with around 580,000 hectolitres of beer (bottles and cans) in 2016, reports Logistics Manager Fred Pietler. "We fill our own brands here in brown 0.5-litre NRW and longneck, brown and green ale bottles with 0.33 l and 0.5 l, brown Vichy bottles with third and half litres and green and brown Steinie bottles with 0.33 l." Each variety has a strictly Defined bottle colour and sizetherefore the Empties also accordingly precisely sorted are used. The brewery uses 20 and 24 litre crates and 30 litre containers for the Steinie bottles. "We used to sort all empties ourselves. In view of the constantly increasing proportion of foreign bottles, we urgently needed an alternative. Since we entrusted Novatec with the complete sorting of empties, we have been able to make significant savings in labour and energy costs, but now we always have enough empties in stock for production," says Pietler.
Flexible solution
The solution for Pietler and Gilde-Brauerei is Novatec Verpackungstechnik, based in Langenhagen near Hanover, with its Managing Director Christoph Sauer. He was very familiar with the dry section with depalletiser and palletiser installed by Kettner in 1992. He founded Novatec in 1998 and since then the company has been planning, designing and selling customised transport and handling solutions for the food and beverage industry. "With our very flexible machines in the high-tech sector, which we always adapt individually to each customer, we also fully meet the growing and changing requirements at Gilde," emphasises Sauer. In the brewery, the fully automatic machine, which is specially designed for the conditions there, is used in a variety of applications. NovaSort" empties sorting system which is operated by Novatec itself.
Speed up, costs down
Camera recognition provides the "NovaSort" system with an exact indication of which bottle is in which position in a crate. Empties are sorted and the containers are packed by type via handling gantries. In the first portal two unpackers with 2 x 2 unpacking heads in direct succession for the very high speed and performance of the system. With each stroke, they pull the bottles of different types out of two boxes and place them on assigned tapes ab: One band is for bottles that are not used at all at Gilde. These are disposable bottles or bottles with embossing, which are disposed of manually (disposable) or placed in crates and later transported for bottle exchange. On a second conveyor, the individually controlled packing tulips, which handle the bottle mouths very carefully, deposit the bottles that are not currently being processed. These bottles are compacted a few metres further on a belt in the packer and used to fill the crates that are not currently required.
Something very special
Before the Packer as a second handling system there is a Discharge of cullet. Other foreign objects such as crown caps or strings are also removed here, thus preventing faults. Once the previously set filling level of the conveyor belts has been reached, the bottles remain in the corresponding crate and are then compacted in the packer and missing bottles are added. This optional New glass feed are therefore always Complete, unmixed boxes no other bottle sorting system can do this," says Christoph Sauer proudly. "This way, there are no empty crates and we continuously renew the bottle pool." The intelligent control system makes it possible to customise the setting of the empties. This means that a bottle type can also be placed in a new crate (crate change).
Once over 40 crates have been reached, they are fed to the loader, palletised, transported to the interim storage area and stored there or immediately fed into production. In the "NovaSort" system, the touch panel three main varieties adjustable. This can Three additional container types be fed into the system. "The biggest advantage of 'NovaSort' is that we have experienced five years of development in practice. We operate the sorting system at the Gilde brewery and have continuously developed and optimised 'NovaSort'," explains Christoph Sauer.
Effective, cost-effective sorting
"We give an eight-year guarantee on our system. In the relatively small space of 60 m2 , we offer 100 per cent unmixed crates and sort out the bottles that don't need to be processed. Bottle sorting is therefore not only very reliable, but also significantly more cost-effective than if the brewery sorts the bottles itself or has this done in a sorting centre," summarises Sauer. New bottle or crate types are entered into the system within a few minutes. With a very high proportion of foreign bottles, "NovaSort" can easily handle up to 1,200 crates per hour, with a Mixing degree of less than 50 per cent are even up to 2,400 crates possible.
