Determination of Cycle, Indexing and Rinsing Time for A Designed Small Scale Industrial Bottle Rinsing System

Abstract

In the effort to reduce the environmental impact of waste from industrial production, there is an increasing deeply felt need to recover empty glass and plastic containers. The aim of this study was to design and determine parameters of a glass bottle rinsing machine which operates using the Geneva mechanism. A test rig was designed and fabricated. The rig operates on the intermittent rotary motion from a four slot external Geneva mechanism and requires manual loading and unloading of bottles. The bottles are loaded on subsequent indexing part of the rotating table and are washed one after another. The maximum slot contact force, rinsing time and indexing time were measured and analysed. The contact force was found to be between 15 – 29 N while indexing time was between 0.75 – 2.5 seconds. The rinsing time was found to be in the range of 2.43 to 7.84secs for selected speed range, while indexing time was 0.08 to 1.77secs. This work presents a practical application of Geneva mechanism for worktable indexing and bottle rinsing. This is expected would encourage recycling on small scale

Key words: Contact force, Bottle Rinsing, Small scale, Industrial