What a lot of bottle

Every year, thousands of tonnes of green and flint glass is melted in the furnaces and distributed into the forehearth, before being cut up into pieces, known as gobs. Once these are moulded, the bottles are fed through a lehr oven in order to anneal them. This is a process of heating and slow cooling, which toughens the bottles and relieves internal stresses.

Usher explains that each bottle is then sprayed with a polymer coating to avoid them scuffing against each other while travelling along the conveyor.

The bottles also go through a range of checks to ensure that they will last the distance. "We apply pressure to the point of destruction," says Usher, describing a manual check. "We also have a sample pressure tester on the line, which tests bottles every hour. If any fail the test, it will automatically reject that particular mould, set off an alarm, and pull five or six of the same mould out [of the production line] and re-test them."

The capacity of the bottles is also put through its paces because they must be filled with exact measures. Usher explains: "If you buy a 330ml beer and it contains 331ml you don't say anything, but if you get 329ml, you complain."

The bottle is automatically weighed and filled with water and the temperature of the liquid is recorded. "If water is warm, the level goes up, if it's cooler it goes down," he says.

Come get your fill

If the firing furnace is hell, then surely the filling area could only be described as heaven as bottle after bottle is filled with the liquid gold of famous brands such as Cobra beer.

Quinn is careful to ensure that each bottle is filled to capacity. "Oxygen is removed from the empty bottles and replaced with carbon dioxide or nitrogen," says the firm. "This is then exchanged with filled product."

In addition, a small spurt of hot water shot into the bottle forces the beer to bubble over guaranteeing that any remaining oxygen is removed before the bottle is capped.

Bottles are then automatically placed onto pallets and each layer is separated with cardboard, before being shrink-wrapped. Pallets go into chambers where they are checked for sparks, to avoid the risk of a fire. They are then transported via a railing system into one of the largest automated warehouses in Europe, capable of storing 280,000 pallets of filled and unfilled bottles.

Stay in control

It may only be five years old, but Quinn is very advanced for its age, being one of the few plants that manufactures and fills glass bottles on the same site. The £280M plant has the capacity to produce a whopping four million containers per day.

The factory is in operation 24/7 with 1,000 beer bottles and 400 wine bottles filled per minute, so any downtime is a costly affair. To keep this to a minimum, Quinn works closely with electrical engineering specialist Siemens. "When Quinn Glass compared the PCS 7 distributed control system with alternatives, it saw that the redundant architecture would provide a major advantage in terms of greater plant reliability," says Siemens. Redundant architecture means that the system has multiple controllers operating a process at any single time. If a failure is detected with one controller, the other is able to take over, which considerably reduces the risk of downtime.

Siemens' general manager Brian Holliday, praised Quinn's approach: "It has managed to achieve plant standards despite using a variety of system integrators and original equipment manufacturers and this will pay dividends for their business for years to come." FM

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