The Royal Forest Factory of Glaxo Smith Kline in Coleford produces the well-known energy and sports drinks Ribena, Lucozade and Hydro Active. The globally operating health corporation supplies British consumers with these products in a variety of flavours. To upsize its production capacities for these beverages in PET containers, the company has installed a PET-Asept line from Krones rated at 36,000 bph. The line handles 500-ml PET bottles in two dimensional variants.

• Depalletiser Robot 2A Linear
  The robot operates as a new-container sweep-off depalletiser, grasping the layer of new bottles on all 4 sides and lowering it to the level of the discharge table via an intermediate table. A separate layer pad removal unit takes inverted trays or layer pads off the pallet of new containers.
  
• PET-Asept Line L
  The bottling line is based on the isolator principle, so that treatment of the PET bottles is closed off from the surrounding atmosphere. This concept features the following elements: a steriliser, in which the interior of the bottle is disinfected by a mixture of peracetic acid and steam, a Steriljet steriliser that removes all residues of the sterilising agent by flushing out the bottles with a combined sterile-water/sterile-air nozzle, and the Volumetic VODM-PET filler, which provides full-jet bottle filling without any contact with the filling valve. The closure caps, too, are appropriately treated in this process. The entire line is supplemented by a pure-steam generator, a sterile-water-UHT AquaAsept system and a VarioDos hygiene centre for the various cleaning and disinfection routines run inside the line.
  
• Checkmat FM-IR inspection unit
  After the bottles have left the filler BLOC, the fill level is monitored by the Checkmat, which utilises an infrared system with a sensor for detecting over- or underfills.
  
• Variopac packer
  In the Variopac tray shrink packer, the products are formed into compact-size tray-based packs. Thanks to the flexibility of the container infeed and the lane distribution system, different pack sizes can be produced to suit the bottle diameter involved.
  
• AirCo air conveyors and SynCo bottle conveyors for moving the bottles, MultiCo for transporting the packs and PalCo for conveying the pallets
  
• Pressant Compact palletiser
  After the pallet has been fed in from an external turning unit, the packs are formed into layers on a grouping station and deposited on the pallet. The system is equipped with a separate layer pad inserter and handles 240 layers an hour.
  
• Line documentation System LDS
  Centralised real-time production data recording and storage in the LDS enable the information required for product tracking to be collected and the production performance to be evaluated and displayed using harmonised visualisation.