Packaging Plant Conveyor — Cutting Downtime on a Bottling Line

The Problem

A mid-sized bottling plant was struggling to hit its 300 bottles-per-minute target. The actual sustained line rate was ~210 BPM — about 22% below target — because the three conveyor motor drives were thermally cutting out every 40–60 minutes.

The original installation used 5.5 kW motors paired with 30:1 worm gearboxes for output speed of ~48 rpm, then mechanically doubled to 96 rpm via V-belts. The worm gearboxes, running 80% efficiency at that ratio, were dumping roughly 1 kW of waste heat each, in an indoor plant with ambient summer temperatures above 35°C.

The plant had been adding cooling fans, bigger oil coolers, and even auxiliary water lines — each fix reduced the symptom without addressing the fact that worm gearboxes were the wrong specification for this continuous-duty indoor application.

The Solution

We replaced all three drive trains with Anand Gears helical geared motors: 5.5 kW motor integrated with a 15:1 helical reducer giving 96 rpm directly. V-belts eliminated.

Helical efficiency per stage is 97% versus the worm's 80%. The drive train now dumps about 170 W of heat per unit instead of 1,100 W — an 84% reduction in heat generation.

The inline motor-gearbox format also cut the mechanical footprint by roughly 30%, which helped the plant tuck the drives under the conveyor bed for easier cleaning (important in food-contact applications).

Delivery: 3 weeks. Installation was done over a planned 36-hour weekend shutdown with our service engineer on site.

The Result

“We were going to add a fourth line. Turned out we didn't need one — we just needed the right gearbox on the lines we already had.”

— Production Manager, Bottling Plant (Pune)

Photos from the Job