12 METTLER TOLEDO IndMagazine 2/2005

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Metal detection and dynamic weighing of packed olives.

Previously Agro Sevilla, Seville, Spain, had thought it to be a ‘mission impossible’ toautomate its quality checking at high speed. However, with METTLER TOLEDO equip-ment, capable of checkweighing up to 500 glass jars of olives per minute, the optimumthroughput has been achieved.

Agro Sevilla is the world’s largest pro-ducer, packer and exporter of olives anda leading exporter of olive oil fromSpain. Agro Sevilla is made up of nineolive and seven olive oil cooperativesand 5,500 growers.

The Roda de Andalucía plant, Seville, isdedicated to the processing and packag-ing of olives for export. It has a packingcapacity of 60,000 tonnes per year and aworkforce of 350 employees.

Agro Sevilla exports to an increasingnumber of countries and needs to beable to fulfil the individual requirementsand specifications for each customer.Therefore, the company started makingmodifications and extensions to itsmanufacturing plant.

When Agro Sevilla receives the orderfrom the client it immediately beginsprocessing and aims to fulfil within onemonth to six weeks. Each order is dif-ferent, given that every country has itsown container format, packaging andlabelling.

The olives are packed in either cans orglass jars and in many different sizes. Achallenge was posed when the compa-ny’s clients requested 5-oz cylindricaland conical glass jars. These styles ofpackaging are very narrow and unstable,previously proving difficult to check-weigh quickly. In addition, the increasein exports made it necessary to weigh atgreat speed without the jars falling over.

Agro Sevilla, which already uses variousGARVENS checkweighers on its produc-tion lines, contacted METTLER TOLEDOfor help in solving this problem. The dif-ficulty lay in separating the jars, passingthem through the metal detector, weigh-ing and bringing them back togetheragain without breakages. A single bro-ken jar means rejecting the entire batchof olives due to the possibilty of brokenglass contaminating the jars.

The solution provided by METTLERTOLEDO was to integrate the high-speedS3 Shark checkweigher in combinationwith a highly sensitive Safeline Signa-ture IImetal detector. This made it one ofthe first packing lines able to work usingvery narrow glass bottles at a productionspeed of 500 jars per minute.

One of the most critical points in theprocess is feeding the jars towards themetal detector, METTLER TOLEDO over-came this by installing an endless screwconveyor that separates the jars by 5cm.Jars that do not achieve the minimumweight are rejected from the productionline using a tailor-made solution. Using“fingers” the rejected jars are gentlypushed towards a hinged conveyor belt,running parallel and in the oppositedirection to the main conveyor, at theend of this they are filled with moreolives and go back onto the packing lineto complete the cycle.

Both Carlos Mateos, Industrial Manager,and Enrique Pintos, Deputy Plant Man-ager, are very pleased with the METTLERTOLEDO solution and the support pro-vided by the technical department.

13METTLER TOLEDO IndMagazine 2/2005

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Carlos Mateos explained that when itcame to deciding on what equipmentthey were going to buy, there wasabsolutely no hesitation: they neededsomething that would operate optimally,given the complexity of their instal-lations, and there was no doubt thatMETTLER TOLEDO was the best choiceand offers the maximum assurance.

4www.agrosevilla.com4www.mt.com/themag

High capacity balances unveiledWe have completed our Excellence precision balance line with the addition of large platformmodels.

The Excellence Plus XP-L and Excellence XS-L high capacity balancesoffer standard and unique weighing ranges as well as outstanding per-formance. They are fast, stable and robust – ideal for every day use.

The complete range now boasts small, medium and large platforms pro-viding a weighing range from 210g to 64kg.

Depending on your needs Excellence precision balances provide full com-pliance to quality management systems including password protection,GxP compliance, production certificate and applications from simpleweighing, formulation, density, dynamic weighing statistics and piececounting.

For ease of use the Excellence range is incomparable with touchscreenoperation providing easy access to all functions, colour screen on the XPand a common operating system for XS & XP.

4www.mt.com/xp-precision4www.mt.com/xs-precision4www.mt.com/themag

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