Electricity and Control September 2021

DRIVES, MOTORS + SWITCHGEAR

Customised finish under servo control Bottle caps serve as protection and decoration in one. On one hand, they shield wines and other beverages outwardly, and on the other they act as a decorative design element, lending bottles an individual touch.The design options open to Pinggau-based BT-Watzke are close to endless – because the Styrian company operates its own in-house engineering department and machine shop, which allows it to control how it implements customer requirements – no matter how varied. Servo drive technology from Beckhoff Automation also plays an important role.

T he roots of the Watzke capsule factory date back to 1892. Originally founded as a forge, the traditional company based in Pinggau, in Styria, Austria, has developed into a premium supplier of bottle caps. It has a customer base ranging from small wine producers to mass bottlers. The export quota is around 85%. “We distribute our products to more than 40 countries, including Germany, Scotland, South Africa and Tanzania. We even have our own headquarters for the North American market, located in Sherwood, in the US state of Oregon,” says Christian Stanzel, Managing Director of BT-Watzke GmbH. The customisation options offered by the manufacturer for wine, sparkling wine, spirits and fruit juice bottles, range from “simple” top and side printing to sophisticated foil embossing and other typical design features for caps, such as breathing or cork ventilation holes, spherical or

grid graining, tear-off perforations, or tear-off strips. “Many customers come to us with a template and ask whether we can reproduce the particular design. The fact that we have our own engineering department is tremendously beneficial as it allows us to cater to individual customer requirements in terms of shape, colour, logo, font, and other features. If we don’t have the right tools for a pending order, we carry out a feasibility check and, if necessary, upgrade or convert the existing equipment accordingly,” says Stanzel, highlighting the company’s comprehensive manufacturing expertise. A further attribute of BT-Watzke is that it acts as a one-stop supplier – from low-cost heat shrink capsules to high-quality tin capsules. Other options include capsules made from polylaminate film or aluminium. “There is no other producer in the world that can manufacture the complete range of

closing products at one location. With our Vinotwist twist caps, which we have been producing since 2007, and an ever-growing assortment of caps, we have developed a range of solutions for closing the most varied types of bottles,” says electrical engineer, Daniel Wolf, pointing out the many “facilitator” qualities that characterise the business. It is usually up to him and his colleague Gerhard Schuller to fulfil the required underlying technical conditions to output around 350 million caps a year, working with Workshop Manager Franz Reifbäck and his team. BT-Watzke only rarely purchases ready- made standard machines. “We build almost everything ourselves – and in the way we need it,” Reifbäck says. “It is important for us to be able to respond flexibly to different customer requirements.” Perfectly controlled synchronisation

[Picture: © Beckhoff]

An EL5151 incremental encoder interface records the position of the transport chain as a virtual master axis. All subsequent motion sequences are aligned automatically using the cam disc function available in TwinCAT.

10 Electricity + Control SEPTEMBER 2021