# Bottling Plant Anatomy

A crafted technical illustration of a bottling plant: fly over the floor and dive into each machine as tubes become filled, capped, labelled and packed bottles

By Numa

Topic: Engineering

[Open the interactive Jig](https://ask.jig.com/j/WYm7O68dDN9a)

## Guide

### 1. The whole floor

From up here you can see a whole bottling line at work\. Small plastic tubes go in on the left\. Packs of drinks come out on the right, ready for the shops\. In between, each bottle is made, filled, closed and labelled in just a few minutes\.

A fast line like this can make about 24,000 bottles an hour\. That is around 400 every minute\.

### 2. Every bottle starts as a tube

Each bottle begins as a preform: a small, thick plastic tube with its screw thread already made\. The tubes march past rows of heater lamps\. The lamps warm the plastic until it is soft and bendy, a bit like warm toffee\.

Preforms take far less room than empty bottles, so they are cheaper to deliver\. The plastic is warmed to about 100 °C\.

### 3. One big breath

On the spinning wheel, each warm tube is closed inside a mould\. A rod stretches it down, then a blast of air blows it out against the cold mould walls\. The mould opens, and out comes a full\-size bottle\.

The final blow uses about 30 to 40 bar of air: more than ten times the pressure inside a car tyre\.

### 4. The filling carousel

Empty bottles hang by their necks and glide along on air\. On the filler carousel, every bottle gets its own valve\. As the big ring turns, dozens of bottles fill at the same time, so no one has to wait\.

Bottles are never filled right to the top\. The small gap under the cap, called headspace, gives the drink room\.

### 5. Caps on in seconds

Only a few seconds after filling, each bottle reaches the capper\. Spinning heads drop down and twist a cap on tight\. Closing it so quickly keeps the drink clean and keeps the bubbles in fizzy drinks\.

### 6. Checked and labelled

A camera checks every bottle: is it full enough, and is the cap on straight? A pusher sends any faulty bottle into the bin\. Next, a turning drum wraps a glued label around each bottle as it rolls past\.

In this model, blue shows the drink and caps and coral shows the labels, so you can follow each change\.

### 7. A river of bottles

Before packing, bottles crowd onto a wide table\. This buffer lets one machine pause for a moment without stopping the whole line\. Hundreds of bottles shuffle along, shoulder to shoulder, waiting their turn\.

A line can only run as fast as its slowest machine\. Buffers like this keep the rest moving\.

### 8. Packed and stacked

Bottles are grouped in sixes, and a hot tunnel shrinks plastic film tight around each pack\. Each pack is turned and lined up in rows of three, and a pusher slides four rows together into a layer\. A lifting head sets each layer on a pallet, a wooden base that forklifts can carry\. When three layers are on, the full pallet rolls out and a fresh one drops in\.

### 9. A full day

Press the button to run the line through a whole day in a few seconds, and watch the warehouse fill with pallets\. At 24,000 bottles an hour, one line makes more than half a million bottles a day\.

Next time you open a bottle of water, it may have travelled through a line like this in just a few minutes\.