A bottle unscrambler is a machine used to feed bottles onto production lines in the bottling industries. Many designs are available, but their purpose is the same, feed bottles automatically at high speeds eliminating the expensive, inefficient manual labor of this process.

AMPACK manufactures a full line of Bottle Unscramblers to sort, organize, orient and deliver bottles or containers into a single, upright and orderly fashion, right onto your production line. Whether your container is large or small, your production line is fast or slow, or your product is pharmaceutical, food, beverage, cosmetic, or chemical, AMPACK has a low or high speed bottle unscrambling system to help maximize your production line efficiency.

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Reliable, Superior, Unscrambler Equipment

Having a reliable plastic bottle or container unscrambler is essential to maximize efficiencies and assure your containers are prepared for the next step in the packaging process. Using an unscrambler from AMPACK will make certain you have an unscrambler that is easy to understand, easy to operate and maintain, and will also provide years of trouble free production.

AMPACK’s line of high speed bottle unscramblers include low profile, high performance, space saving, heavy duty, and ergonomically designed models that can be easily integrated with existing or new equipment. These unscramblers will automatically take your decorated or virgin bottles from random bulk, and place them firmly without damage on your packaging line conveyor for downstream operations.

How Do Bottle Unscramblers Work

Bottle unscramblers receive the bottles in random positions since containers are thrown randomly into a large hopper that can hold thousands of bottles. Then those bottles are handled in different ways from the hopper to other parts of the machines, so they are sorted until you get a standing bottle directly in your conveyor going to a bottle filler then to a capping machine, labeler and the rest of the filling line.

This is a basic explanation: there are thousands of bottle designs, and each container needs to be analyzed for a bottle unscrambling machine to work correctly, take into consideration, among other things:

Required Speed

Since the bottle unscrambler is at the beginning of the bottling line, it needs to be the fastest machine to make sure that it can catch up with any of the other filling equipment in the line if there is a stoppage.

Container size

Container size in liquid filling machinery is critical for machine size recommendation; for example, a 32 in bowl machine can do 200 + bottles per minute of a 2oz bottle, but it will only do 10-15 bottles per minute on gallons. Also, a 25 cubic foot hopper can accommodate thousands of 2oz bottles so the machine can run for a long time without any operator, but it can only accommodate a few dozen gallons, so the unscrambler could only run for a few minutes before the hopper has to get filled again.

Design features

Each container design feature on a container can present a challenge on any part of the unscrambling process; it can be too soft, ridges that damage the container, dimensionally hard to orient (Bottle diameter and height are similar), guides on the bottle that catch the hook, among other things.

Installation location

A lot of production lines start without a bottle unscrambler, and when analyzing the possibility to add one, there is no good space to place it on a liquid filling line since these machines tend to be on the largest of the production lines. Normally it’s placed before the liquid filler or powder filling machine. Some customers also install the unscrambler machine right before the labeling machine when it’s convenient to label the containers before the liquid filler.

Material

Container material, the possibility of marking and scratching, fragility, quality issues are a few of the challenges we encounter getting our machines to work properly, pet bottles may require special handling to avoid scratches while getting sorted on the PET bottle unscrambler.

Cleaning containers on unscramblers

We offer air rinsing option on our unscramblers but it’s important to note that the cleaning done on this systems with ionized air or ionized air rinsing is minimal, for containers that require cleaning a dedicated bottle rinser is recommended.

Secondary Orienting

To automatically feed containers into a production line, some containers require secondary orienting so the containers are in the right position before going into the liquid filling machines or packaging equipment. Additional orienting is necessary when the bottle coming out of the bottle unscrambler gets delivered into the conveyor in many positions; an example of this would be a motor oil quart with the off-center neck. On a typical bottle unscrambler, the containers will feed these nonsymmetrical containers either neck leading or neck trailing, so to automate the packaging line, you need to add secondary orientation.