FDBusiness.com

Serac has accomplished its objective to combine its PET linear blower (SBL) with its rotary weight filling machine in a single unit (under the trade name Combox). By the end of 2017, around fifteen Combox units have been installed in Europe, North America, South America and Asia.

The Combox is now also available in an Aseptic version. It provides new opportunities in the dairy and beverages industry by offering a low and medium work-rate solution for applications using pH neutral and acidic products with volumes of up to 12,000 PET bottles per hour for the 1-litre format and up to 18,000 PET bottles per hour for the smaller 250 ml formats.

An accessible aseptic blowing and filling solution

The aseptic filling market presently only offers a very limited choice of medium work-rate integrated filling lines: on the one hand for cardboard, and on the other hand for bottles with complete high work-rate blowing-filling-capping lines. With the Aseptic Combox, Serac now offers a single-unit, blowing-filling solution for medium work-rate lines.

The ideal solution to accompany the development of dairy beverages and juices

Bottles are playing an ever greater role in the long conservation products market, particularly in small and medium size formats (white, flavoured or supplemented milks, vegetable milks, baby milks, nutritional drinks, fruit juices…). Packaging of beverages in small bottles, outside the cold chain, is perfectly adapted to the needs of nomad consumption (at school, in sport halls, in the office) with re closable and easy-to-hold bottles.

By investing in the Aseptic Combox, industrialists give themselves the possibility to get on board this trend and take advantage of these new market opportunities. Their range of products may be expanded rapidly thanks to the use of a production tool offering both high performance and flexibility as follows :

– Positive and direct transfer of containers by the neck between the blower and the filling machine limits the risk of container contamination; absence of container transfer via silos, then uprighters, etc… thus reducing investment costs,

– No open air conveyor: more compact system (reduced dimensions) and more reliable, less risk of blockages.

– A single operator for the entire blowing-filling unit (both HMI control panels are on the same support improving user friendliness).

– H₂O₂ decontamination of containers reduces the risk of re-contamination just before filling.

– An extremely flexible system with fast, easy and risk free change of container format.  As the blower is located outside the sterile zone, there is no risk of re-contamination when changing the forming mold. The change of tooling at the filling machine exit also takes place outside the sterile zone.

– Safe and easy maintenance with easier access points outside the isolator.

Aseptic filling backed up by almost 40 years of experience

The Aseptic Combox solution incorporates the SAS 5 filling machine which meets the strictest requirements for sensitive products. It profits from Serac’s extensive know how in the field of aseptic filling. Presently available on the market in a version where the containers (bottles & caps) are sterilized as standard with hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂), Serac will soon be proposing the Aseptic Combox in a version where container decontamination is carried out by e-beam, thanks to its latest sterilization module known as βluStream.