careful handling of the fragile tea throughout the entire processing chain:
product feeding, cleaning of tea (sieving, grading, removing grit), mixing, storage, feeding of packing machines
guaranteeing consistent product quality
automatic dosing of flavourings
The Solution
Careful handling of raw materials in the manufacture of tea blends and flavoured teas
The unprocessed tea is usually delivered in large sacks, which need to be fed into the closed system. AZO has developed a special-purpose feeding hopper for this.It makes it possible to feed the tea from both sides at a sack discharge station when necessary.
If the raw materials are delivered in big bags, there are simpler discharge stations available.
The raw materials used in making the tea blends are conveyed very carefully and with a high degree of precision to the mixers using pneumatic vacuum weighing systems.
The finished tea blend is temporarily stored in silos after the mixing process. Special-purpose vacuum conveyors ensure that transfer of the materials to the silos or to the packing and filling machines is done carefully, without breakage and without segregation.
A greater variety of raw materials has to be automated in the production of flavoured teas. Here, the basic types of tea are weighed onto vacuum conveying scales with gram accuracy and discharged into a bulk materials container. This bulk materials container is supported on an AZO COMPONENTER® drive unit with floor scales. The AZO COMPONENTER® is a particularly flexible container system.
The flavourings and fruit additives are stored at sack discharge stations, which are arranged along the linear drive unit of the AZO COMPONENTER®. The AZO COMPONENTER® collects these flavourings and additives, dosed with gram accuracy, into the bulk materials container and transfers the finished batch to a container mixer.
After the mixing process, the bulk materials containers are transported to discharge stations above the filling area. These discharge bases are allocated to the individual filling lines. The containers are placed on the stations and discharged by gravity to the filling lines.
The entire plant can be controlled and monitored using the AZO process control and instrumentation system. The controls ensure end-to-end documentation and tracking and tracing of manufacturing process.
