Critical cooling on line
November 1st 2007

Tricool process chillers are providing critical cooling on the bottling lines at Silver spring's manufacturing facilities in Folkestone.

The plant has seven injection moulding and eight blow moulding lines and manufactures up to 26 000 bottles per hour per machine, totalling some 250 million bottles every year.

Injection moulding the preforms from PET granules requires a temperature of 275°C. Silver Spring uses a Tricool TEC 140 air-cooled chiller and two multi-circuit water-cooled chillers for most of the preform and blow moulding production.

The neck size remains constant so the preforms are blown from the neck downwards at 120°C to the required bottle size, then cooled before being filled. A Tricool TEC 450 air-cooled chiller used in a satellite area controls temperatures for two additional blow moulders and for 'flash pasteurisation' on the line catering for the company's fruit juice-based drinks.

Tricool designed multiple circuit chillers and built in redundancy so that if one chiller fails the manufacturing process is not interrupted

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