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State of the Art Survey of the Energy and Media Demand of German Beverage-bottling Plants
I. A. Osterroth, A. Holm, and T. Voigt

Sustainability is a megatrend in the packaging industry. Increasing costs, legal requirements and societal trends have put energy optimisation into the focus of the beverage-bottling industry. An essential requirement for profound energy optimisation is a reliable database. The study presented in this paper gathered energy and media demand data from bottling plants at the machine level, as there is a lack of scientific and publicly available data. A detailed questionnaire was provided to German bottling companies. The companies surveyed provided information characterising their bottling plants in terms of nominal speed, age and product range. They also provided data regarding production planning, information on the use of energy management systems and detailed data on machine-related power demand. With an increasing level of detail (e.g. state-based energy demand of machines) the amount of available information decreases. Data were gathered on the installed load of the machines, which could showed a linear correlation to the nominal speed of most machines. Further data for the demand of electrical energy during operation and standby and for the heat and water demand were raised. The electrical energy demand during standby has the highest value for the example of the bottling cleaning machine (median 7.5 kW for n = 10 machines). The heat demand of bottle cleaning machines was found to be 25?80 kJ/bottle. For the fresh water consumption values below 300ml/bottle (arithmetic mean: 220 ml) where found for most machines. The survey shows that more than 80 % of the surveyed companies in the bottling industry are already investing in measures to reduce energy and media demand or plan to do so in the future. The assembled database allows a first benchmark of machines in industrial applications and serves as a reference point for the purchase of new machinery and for further research on optimisation strategies. However, the study shows that there is still insufficient knowledge of the energy demand of bottling plants. Only few companies were able to give detailed information of the energy and media demand at machine level. Further effort are still necessary to increase the database to provide representative values for the bottling industry. General demand models, unified standards for data acquisition and further research on bottling-plant energy demand are necessary to fully exploit the potential energy savings.

Descriptors: energy demand, bottling plants, machine level

BrewingScience, 70 (May/June 2017), pp. 86-99