Brazil’s Petrópolis has set itself the target of increasing its production capacity by 860 million litres of beer per year. To achieve this milestone, the company decided to build a completely new brewery in Uberaba, Minas Gerais in 2019 and has just now reached record performance.
The project included four filling and packaging lines: two can lines with a total capacity of 256,000 cans per hour and two returnable glass lines for 140,000 bottles per hour. In addition, a Steinecker supplied two identical beer lines with a total of 40 tanks.
The first figures of the new factory reveal that the brewery reached a production of almost 6 million cans filled in a single day in the two lines of Uberaba, a record for the Petrópolis Group.
“Our production lines have been designed with a level of automation and digitalization that allows predictive action from our maintenance, monitoring and acting to maximize the life of our components and equipment. The efficiency of the lines in a factory like ours is 92%, which guarantees world-class productivity”, emphasizes Diego Gomes, industrial director of the Petrópolis Group.
In September 2020, three weeks after the commissioning of the first canning line, which was designed for a capacity of 128,000 cans per hour, the operation reached 120,000 cans per hour in three shifts, reaching peaks of two hours at maximum throughput in a row. Two months later, further tests showed an average efficacy of 95%. A second canning line, installed in November, operated at 98.10% two weeks after start-up.
