The Benefits of Using bottle blowing machines

What Is the Purpose of a Bottle Blowing Machine?

A bottle blowing machine, also known as a blow molding machine, serves the purpose of manufacturing plastic bottles and containers through a process called blow molding. The primary goal of this machine is to produce hollow plastic objects, such as bottles, by shaping and molding molten plastic into a specific form. Here are the key purposes and functions of a bottle blowing machine:

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Forming Bottles and Containers: The main purpose of a bottle blowing machine is to shape molten plastic material into bottles or containers. The machine utilizes the blow molding process, which involves inflating a parison (a tube of plastic) within a mold to create the desired shape.

Customized Designs and Sizes: Bottle blowing machines are versatile and can produce bottles in various shapes, sizes, and designs. This flexibility allows manufacturers to meet specific product and branding requirements, producing bottles tailored to the needs of different industries.

Efficient Production: Bottle blowing machines are designed for high-speed and efficient production. They can produce a large number of bottles in a relatively short amount of time, contributing to cost-effectiveness and meeting the demands of mass production.

Chemical Bottle 

Consistent Quality: These machines are capable of ensuring consistent quality in the produced bottles. The automated nature of the process helps maintain precision and uniformity in the shape and thickness of the bottles, resulting in a reliable and standardized product.

Material Efficiency: Bottle blowing machines optimize material usage by molding plastic into specific shapes with minimal waste. This contributes to resource efficiency and cost savings in the production process.

Wide Range of Applications: The bottles produced by these machines find applications in various industries, including beverage, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and household product packaging. The machine can accommodate different plastic materials suitable for the intended use of the bottles.

Automation and Control: Many modern bottle blowing machines feature advanced automation and control systems. These systems monitor and control parameters such as temperature, pressure, and timing to ensure consistent and high-quality production.

Integration with Downstream Processes: Bottle blowing machines are often integrated into larger production lines. After the bottles are molded, they can be conveyed to other processes such as filling, labeling, and packaging, streamlining the overall manufacturing workflow.

Sustainability Considerations: Some bottle blowing machines are designed to support sustainability goals by incorporating features such as energy-efficient processes and the ability to use recycled plastics. This aligns with the growing emphasis on environmentally friendly practices in manufacturing.

In summary, a bottle blowing machine is a crucial component in the plastic bottle manufacturing process. Its purpose is to efficiently and consistently produce hollow plastic containers in various shapes and sizes, meeting the demands of diverse industries while optimizing material usage and ensuring quality.

Efficient Blowing Machine Solutions for Bottle Blowing

Blow Molding Machine丨Working Principle, Process Flow and Common Problems and Solutions in the Blow Molding Process

The principle of the bottle blowing machine

The blowing process of the bottle blowing machine is divided into two parts.

1. Warm-up

An infrared high-temperature lamp irradiates the preform to heat and soften the preform. To maintain the shape of the bottle mouth, the preform mouth does not need to be heated, so a particular cooling device is required to cool it. 

2. Blow moulding

The preheated preform is placed in the blow mould, and the inside is inflated with high pressure to blow the preform into the required bottle. The automatic bottle blowing machine combines the two operations of bottle blowing through the operation of the manipulator, eliminating the need for the manual process of putting the preheated preform into the blowing mould. Significantly accelerate the rate of production. 

5D/12D/20D Double Station Blow Molding Machine

The process flow of the bottle blowing machine

The blow moulding machine process of the bottle blowing machine is a two-way stretching process. In this process, the PET chain is extended, oriented and arranged in two directions, which increases the mechanical properties of the bottle wall. It improves the tensile, tensile, and impact strength. It has good airtightness.

Although stretching helps to increase strength, it should not be overstretched. It is necessary to control the stretch-inflation ratio:

Do not exceed 3.5-4.2 in the radial direction and 2.8-3.1 in the axial direction. The wall thickness of the preform should not exceed 4.5mm.

Blowing is carried out between the glass transition temperature and the crystallization temperature, generally controlled between 90 and 120 degrees. The PET exhibits a highly elastic state in this interval and becomes a transparent bottle after rapid blow moulding and cooling, and setting.

This temperature is determined by the length of the cooling time during the injection moulding process (such as the Aoki bottle blowing machine), so the relationship between the injection and blowing stations must connect.

The blowing process includes stretching-blowing once-blowing twice. The three actions are concise, but they must be well-coordinated, especially the first two steps to determine the overall distribution of the material and the blowing quality.

Therefore, it is necessary to adjust: stretching start timing, stretching speed, pre-blowing start and end timing, pre-blowing pressure, pre-blowing flow, etc.; if possible, it is better to control the overall temperature distribution of the preform, bottle The temperature gradient of the inner and outer walls of the blank. In the process of rapid blow moulding and cooling, induced stress is generated in the bottle wall. For gas-filled beverage bottles, it can resist internal pressure, which is beneficial. Still, hot-filled bottles must ensure that it is fully released above the glass transition temperature.

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Common problems and solutions in the blowing process of the bottle blowing machine

1. What should I do with the bottom of the bottle blown by the bottle blowing machine?

The common factor for bottle accumulation is that the stretching rod is not adjusted in place. It is recommended that the stretching ratio between the preform and the bottle body is preferably 1:2.5 (excluding the mouth part), and at the same time adjust the heating temperature to extend the pre-blowing.

2. What should I do if the bottle’s mouth-blown by the bottle blowing machine is deformed?

Bottle mouth deformation Generally, during the heating process of the preform, the transmission chain drives the bottle base to transfer the temperature to the preform mouth. During the heating process, the temperature continues to accumulate, and the bottle mouth bulges and deforms. It only needs to increase the air-cooling or water-cooling of the bottle mouth. If the customer’s conditions permit, you can refer to the imported machine to install central air-conditioning in the production workshop to keep the ambient temperature of the workshop at an average temperature.

3. How can the bottle-blowing machine be operated, and which accessories should be checked?

As long as the equipment is controlled strictly following the method in the instruction manual and the performance of each safety door is checked regularly, the equipment as a whole is safe. However, the most significant hidden danger of the equipment is mainly on the seals of the water jacket and air jacket. For example, the water and air jacket are damaged, and the maintenance works are more troublesome.

portable sports bottle

4. How much chiller is needed for the carbonated beverage bottle blowing machine to blow the bottle?

The chiller for the carbonated bottle is about five times larger than the chiller for the water bottle. A simpler algorithm can be calculated at bottles/hp; for example, bottles/hour can equip with a 30-hp chiller. To ensure the stress requirements of the carbonate bottle bottom, the cooling time is generally 1.2 seconds, and the bottom mould temperature is 11 degrees. The number of lamp zones in the heating furnace can refer to the configuration of the hot filling machine, and the adequate heating time of the preform should be no less than 33 seconds.

5. What is the highest temperature resistance of the non-crystalline bottle mouth of the hot-filling bottle blowing machine? How many grams of preforms are needed?

At present, the preform mouths used in the production of hot-filled bottles in the industry are generally divided into crystalline mouths and non-crystalline mouths, and non-crystalline mouths are divided into 28 months and 38 months.

As far as the bottle mouth is concerned, the crystalline mouth can withstand 100 degrees without deformation, but the upper limit of heat resistance of the non-crystal mouth is only 92 degrees.

The preform and grammage used for blowing the medium-temperature bottle are best selected according to the requirements of hot filling. Suppose it is designed according to the single-mode bottles/hour. In that case, the single-mode cycle is 2.1 seconds, of which 1/4 of the time is the time to unlock the mould, and the remaining 3/4 of the time is the processing time, minus the balance; sealing, stretching, and pre-blowing is 0.2 seconds. The time for high-pressure forming and pressure-holding crystallization is only 1 second, the time for cold blowing and setting is 0.3 seconds, and the time for closing and closing is 0.1 seconds.

The time allocation mentioned here is only a reference value, and the specific time should be adjusted and guaranteed in real-time through the control panel during production.

Strictly speaking, compressed air must be processed by a freeze dryer before it can be used for high blowing and cold blowing. Because the pipeline between the air compressor and the bottle-blowing machine is long, to avoid the pipeline from being exposed to the sun, The compressed air pipeline used for cold blowing and shaping must be covered with thermal insulation cotton to ensure that the temperature of the air source is not affected.

PET bottles have already penetrated every part of people's lives - whether it is food, beverages, cosmetics, or even the medicines we use, you can see it in them. But how are these PET bottles with different shapes and functions produced? The answer lies in the fully automatic production of PET bottle-blowing machines. This article provides a detailed explanation of the production principles, application scenarios and production advantages of PET bottle blowing machines to help you have a preliminary understanding of PET bottle blowing machines and gain some inspiration.

What is a PET bottle blowing machine?

It refers to a production machine used to manufacture bottles of different shapes and sizes with simple working principle: relying on the applied air pressure, the blow molding machine blows air into the heated preform and shapes it with a specific mold wrapped outside.

In detail, the overall production process of the bottle blowing machine is as follows:

The initial phase involves warming up by heating the PET bottle preform to achieve the required molding temperature while ensuring even heating of both the inner and outer walls of the body. As the bottle mouth has a distinct shape, it does not require heating, and instead, it needs to be cooled during the body's embryo heating process.

The second step is bottle blowing. The evenly heated bottle preform is fed into the blow molding mold through a chain, and sterile high-pressure air is blown into the bottle preform through the middle of the mandrel to stretch it circumferentially, so that it is inflated until it is close to the mold wall, and then cooled.

The third step is to demould. After the bottle blowing is completed, the machine begins to exhaust and demould.

The fourth step is to transmit. The formed PET bottles are sent to the bottle unloading station through the conveyor belt, and are pulled up and blown out by the bottle unloading cylinder. If it is in the blow-paste-fill-cap machine produced by TECH-LONG, it will be sent to the next machine to continue packaging.

Where are PET bottle blowing machines used?

If you look around at the products that use PET bottles, you can see a clue: PET bottles can not only hold liquids, but also semi-solids. The usage scenarios of plastic bottle blowing machines are in factories that produce these products, including:

• Pharmaceutical industry
• Food industry
• Beverage industry
• Cosmetics industry

Of course, packaging companies that provide PET plastic bottles for the above industries can also use PET bottle blowing machines suitable for mass production.

What are the benefits of using TECH-LONG’s sixth generation PET bottle blowing machine?

Since the introduction of the first PET bottle blowing machine in the s, people have been constantly improving bottle blowing technology. As a leader in the liquid industry, TECH-LONG's R&D team continues to upgrade products according to the requirements of different times, and has now launched a new sixth-generation PET bottle blowing machine. The sixth-generation PET bottle blowing machine, which combines the efforts of R&D engineers and TECH-LONG’s deep industry experience, has the following excellent performance:

1. High-speed production.  TECH-LONG has developed a production enhancement strategy to meet the growing demands for increased production volume from manufacturers, which has successfully raised the maximum productivity to an impressive 95,200 bottles per hour.

2. Consistent quality. Due to the unified mold and automatic bottle blowing system, the PET bottle blowing machine can be produced on a large scale and maintain product quality, uniformity and stability.

3. Flexibility. After improvements, TECH-LONG's sixth-generation blow molding machine can now use different molds to produce bottles of different types, improving the flexibility and mobility of the production line.

4. High reliability. TECH-LONG, as a prominent player in China's high-end liquid packaging sector, has garnered significant acclaim and recognition over its 24-year journey. However, this has not deterred us from continuously seeking improved packaging solutions. TECH-LONG's innovation-driven approach has consistently secured its position on the Guangzhou Enterprise Innovation List, earning deep trust and recognition from its esteemed clientele.