Water bottler successfully upgrades compressed air system

Growing product demand recently led alkaline water bottler E’stel Water to invest in a tailored Kaeser compressed air system, complete with a turnkey DN series booster, in order to meet the high compressed air pressure requirements of the company’s PET blow moulding machine.

E’stel Water is alkaline water that is sourced and bottled in Nelson, New Zealand. The water comes from the snow-capped mountains of New Zealand and travels underground where it filters through various minerals, before being extracted, transported to the bottling plant, bottled, capped, labelled and packed in plastic bottles that are manufactured on-site using a PET blow moulding machine.

The PET blow moulding machine relies on an efficient supply of compressed air, which at some point of the process needs to be pressurised up to 40 bar. This inflates the soft PET plastic into a mould cavity which takes the desired shape and size of the water bottles. With a standard industrial compressor reaching around a 10 bar pressure, a booster compressor is required at those points in the production process where this high pressure compressed air is required, to literally boost, or increase, the air pressure up to the desired level.

But as demand for E’stel Water has grown, so too have the requirements of the bottling plant. This led to the recent investment in a much larger capacity PET blow moulding machine, which is able to blow an impressive 11,000 bottles/h. A new compressed air system was thus required to meet this increased demand for compressed air.

Wayne Herring, co-founder and director of E’stel Water, called compressed air specialist and authorised Kaeser partner PSL Total Air to present a suitable solution. In order to meet both the low- and high-pressure compressed air demand of the new blow moulding machine, PSL recommended and subsequently installed a complete compressed air system that included a Kaeser CSD 105 rotary screw compressor and a Kaeser DN 22 series booster.

The Kaeser DN 22 is a compact, plug-and-play turnkey package, with the integrated booster systems delivered and configured ex works to provide a system that is ready for immediate use. The DN series boosters are available with initial working pressures of 3 to 13 bar with final working pressure 10 to 45 bar, motor power 22 to 45 kW and free air deliveries of 2.9 to 19.6 m³/min.

All DN series boosters are equipped with Premium Efficiency IE3 class drive motors, complying with and exceed prevailing Australian GEMS regulations for three-phase electric motors. Along with the generously dimensioned axial fan, which also assures good temperature control, this contributes to the booster’s energy efficiency.

The boosters come with an integrated Sigma Control 2 controller, which delivers efficient control and monitoring of the compressor operation. This simplifies the diagnostics process for precision service and maintenance work. They can also be connected to a monitoring system, such as the Sigma Air Manager 4.0 master controller, allowing full integration into an Industrie 4.0 environment.

According to Herring, the Kaeser DN 22 series booster was a suitable high compressed air pressure solution for E’stel, noting, “We already had two standard pressure Kaeser Aircenter compressed air systems being used for various other pneumatic applications within the facility, so we knew these compressors were reliable — something that is very important to our operation.

“When we started researching high-pressure compressed air solutions, a lot of products on the market seemed to be manufactured using quite dated technologies, and the replacement of parts would have worked out to be very expensive. With the Kaeser DN 22 booster we were presented with a cost-effective and state-of-the-art packaged solution.

“PSL was able to tailor a compressed air supply system to meet our exact needs, and it is already proving to deliver an energy-efficient and reliable supply of compressed air on demand. Their aftersales service has also been fantastic.”