Piston Filler Equipment and Technology News
The Piston Filler
Have you ever counted how many items in containers you use every day?
In grooming, for example, you have shampoo, liquid soap, toothpaste, mouth wash, etc. Though most of us don’t realize it, machines that fill various containers are important to our society.
So what exactly are these machines? Basically, this machine system includes a tank with openings at the bottom that release products, like ice cream, in regulated amounts into containers.
What is a piston filler?
This equipment is great for thick products like cream or paste. Even products with chunks, like tomato sauce with real tomatoes, are distributed into containers well by this machine.
The piston filler is a filling system that has a piston inside the cylinder attached to the bottom part of the product tank. This system works by pulling the piston deep into the cylinder to draw a specific amount of the product from the tank into the cylinder. The piston is then pushed so that the product is pushed out of the cylinder. A rotating valve switches position just before the product is pushed out of the cylinder so that it goes out the nozzle instead of back into the tank. Then the valve returns to its original position so that when the piston draws into the cylinder again it sucks the product from the tank and not air through the nozzle.
This machine is a type of volumetric filler because the volume of product placed in the containers is predetermined. This system becomes a rotary filler when there is a rotary machine that positions containers under the nozzle for filling. This is especially true for automatic and semi-automatic models.
Inline Filling Systems, Inc. has several stainless steel models of this machine:
- The most affordable is the entry-level production filling equipment that fills less than three thousand containers in a day. An operator uses a footswitch to release the product into the container he or she is holding just below the nozzle.
- The semi-automatic production filling machine, that also fills less than three thousand containers in a day, automatically releases the product at regular intervals. All the operator has to do is hold the containers underneath the nozzle.
- The Intermediate Automatic Production filling system can fill up to one thousand containers in a day. It is so easy to use that the operator only needs to put the containers on the rotary machine.
- The company’s premium product is the high performance automatic production filling equipment which can fill six thousand or more containers in day.
See the company’s website, www.fillers.com for more information.
Although effective, this equipment is almost outdated because of the servo positive displacement fillers. The system is now more popular because it can be used for thick and thin liquids, unlike the piston filling device which is limited to viscous products.