AUCHAN

Looking back at the century-old development history of the global beverage industry, every production capacity leap and quality breakthrough in the industry is accompanied by technological innovation of beverage filling production lines. From the first manual glass bottle filling machine born at the end of the 19th century, to today's fully automated intelligent production line that can output tens of thousands of bottles per hour, the iteration history of beverage filling production lines is itself the growth history of the global beverage industry.

In the early days, beverage filling production lines had scattered processes and extremely low automation. Processes such as bottle washing, filling and capping operated independently, requiring a large number of workers to transfer materials between different stations. This not only led to low production efficiency, but also made it difficult to stably guarantee the hygiene and safety of products. With the gradual popularization of mechatronics technology, beverage filling production lines began to move towards process integration. Functions such as bottle sorting, rinsing, filling and capping were integrated into the same linkage system, and the continuous conveying mechanism completed the automatic transfer of bottles between different processes, which greatly improved the operation efficiency of the entire beverage filling production line.

After entering the 21st century, asepsis has become one of the most important development directions of beverage filling production lines. The microbial control standard of Log6 has gradually become the standard configuration of high-end beverage filling production lines. Through the dry hydrogen peroxide gas sterilization process, beverage filling production lines can achieve the strict control level that less than 1 bottle in 1 million products is allowed to have microbial contamination. It is the popularization of this high-standard beverage filling production line that makes normal-temperature fruit juices and sugar-free tea drinks without preservatives become the mainstream of the market, completely changing the product structure of the entire beverage industry.

In recent years, the integration of digital technology is bringing a new round of technological changes to beverage filling production lines. The new type of beverage filling production lines equipped with Internet of Things and digital twin systems can upload real-time operation data of the whole process to the management platform. The operation status, filling accuracy and energy consumption value of the equipment can be displayed visually. The predictive maintenance function based on big data analysis can also identify potential equipment failures in advance, greatly reducing the probability of unplanned shutdowns and significantly increasing the annual effective operation time of the beverage filling production line. At the same time, full-line unmanned operation has also become an important development direction of beverage filling production lines. Collaborative robots and automatic guided vehicles are gradually applied to links such as finished product transportation and palletizing. Some advanced beverage filling production lines only need 1-3 technicians to complete remote on-duty to finish the whole production process.

Under the industry orientation of green production, energy saving and consumption reduction have also become the core optimization direction of the new generation of beverage filling production lines. The integrated beverage filling production line with the functions of blow molding, labeling, filling and capping has greatly reduced the comprehensive energy consumption of the whole line through high integration of processes. The supporting flexible intelligent CIP cleaning system can greatly reduce water consumption and sewage discharge in the production process on the premise of ensuring the cleaning effect, helping beverage manufacturers to achieve more environmentally friendly and sustainable production.

Nowadays, cross-industry technical compatibility has become a new development feature of beverage filling production lines. After adaptive adjustment, beverage filling production lines can also be applied to the production scenarios of other liquid products such as food and daily chemicals. A flexible beverage filling production line can meet different production demands of multi-category, small-batch and large-scale production, providing new possibilities for production upgrading in related industries. In the future, with the further integration of artificial intelligence technology, beverage filling production lines will have stronger autonomous decision-making capabilities, and continue to create higher value for the production and manufacturing of global liquid products.