# Bottling Plant Anatomy

How a bottling line moves empty bottles through rinsing, filling, capping, labelling and packing, seen from above\. Follow each bottle from pallet to boxed pallet\.

By okbeginning123

Topic: Engineering

[Open the interactive Jig](https://ask.jig.com/j/l91UCenj9tWk)

## Transcript

### 1. A bottling plant from above

This is a whole bottling line, seen from the roof\. Empty bottles come in on the left, and full, capped, labelled bottles leave on the right in boxes\. Every machine is linked, so the bottles never stop moving\.

Drag anywhere on the floor to turn the plant and look around\.

### 2. Empties arrive on pallets

Clean empty bottles arrive stacked in layers on a pallet\. The depalletiser lifts the stack and a sweep bar pushes the whole top layer onto a table\. From there the bottles squeeze into a single file\.

A full pallet carries about 1,500 empty 330 ml bottles\.

### 3. An upside\-down rinse

In the rinser, grippers hold each bottle by the neck and turn it upside down\. Jets of clean water or air flush out any dust, then the bottle is turned upright again\.

Bottles are rinsed upside down, but they are always filled the right way up\.

### 4. The filler carousel

The heart of the plant is a spinning carousel\. Each bottle is lifted under its own filling valve and filled to an exact level as it rides around\. The drink comes from the ring\-shaped bowl above\.

Drag the carousel to turn it yourself: every machine moves with it, because they are geared together\.

### 5. A cap, straight away

Seconds after filling, the bottle passes to the capper\. A crown cap slides down a chute, and a capping head presses it on to seal the drink in\.

A crown cap has 21 little crimps around its edge\.

### 6. Label and check

Next, a label is wrapped around each bottle as it passes a spinning drum\. A camera checks every bottle for the right fill and a straight cap\. A pusher can knock a faulty one into the reject bin\.

A date and batch code are printed too, so every bottle can be traced\.

### 7. Crowds on the table

The single file spreads out into a wide, slow carpet of bottles\. This accumulation table is a waiting room\. If the packer pauses for a moment, bottles queue here instead of stopping the whole line\.

The slowest machine sets the pace for the whole line\.

### 8. Packed and stacked

The case packer drops bottles into boxes of twelve\. A palletiser stacks the boxes in layers on a pallet\. Wrapped pallets wait in rows for the trucks\.

This pallet takes 48 boxes: 576 bottles\.

### 9. Mass production

Now let the whole plant run\. A line like this can fill 150 bottles a minute, and the biggest lines run four times faster\. Every bottle gets the same rinse, fill, cap and label\.

At 150 a minute, one line makes about 72,000 bottles in an eight\-hour shift\.