Energy Consumption of Beverage-Bottling Machines

Sustainability is a megatrend influencing the beverage industry. Knowledge of the consumption behavior and suitable metrics are required for energy optimization strategies. Machine efficiency and energy consumption are intermixed in common parameters, e.g., customary specifications refer to the energy consumption for a specific number of products (e.g., kWh/1000 fillings). This does not reflect the influence that inevitable breakdown times have on the energy consumption (e.g., malfunction, lack, and tailback situations within the material flow). While specific energy performance indicators are useful as a benchmark, it does not provide reliable information to verify plant specifications, or to have a source-related cost allocation as a basis for a weak point analysis. In this work, energy and operational data were analyzed, in order to find a generic description of the operational-state related consumption behavior. Therefore, empirical data on the effective electrical energy and operational state data were collected on machine level of two representative bottling plants and for additional single machines. In the frequency distributions of the discrete values of the measured electrical energy data, three main peaks were found. These can be correlated to operational states such as state-related energy demand level. The change from one demand level to another was found to be reproducible.