Ardagh Glass Packaging - Europe recently completed an investment project at its Wyszkow facility in Poland.
The project included the latest available suite of sustainable technology to reduce emissions and improve energy and resource efficiency.
Projects on this scale are massive investments and rarely undertaken in Europe, so choosing the right contractors was of paramount importance.
Forglass delivered the batch and cullet plant as a turnkey system – from design and engineering, through fabrication of all components in Forglass’ own facility, to installation and startup.
The plant includes storage for raw material and five types of external cullet, all of the dosing, mixing and transport equipment, as well as a complete cullet return system for both cold and hot end.
The system for weighing and dosing raw materials includes an innovation from Forglass, Vibe – a vibratory dosing feeder, which is more precise than specified and allows the new batch plant to operate just nine hours per day while allowing the furnace to produce with maximum pull at the same time.
Forglass said the autonomous cullet dosing system provides precise dosing in ratios between 20 and 80% cullet content.
Noteworthy are two other innovations from Forglass included in the cullet return system: SmartScraper and Selectable Grain Crusher.
The SCADA control system is custom-designed for Ardagh. It allows for functionalities like user permissions management, PLC live status, weighing parameters, three modes of sand moisture measurement, daily batch quality and precision auto-reports, and automatic adjustment of cullet and batch feeding up to recipe quantity.
To ensure reliability, the system is equipped with double redundancy and four types of batch plant operation management.
