A bottling hall is wet, sugary and never quiet
Bottling and canning lines are wet by design. Rinsers, fillers, cappers and pasteurisers all use water, and the product itself is a sugar solution that stays sticky after the water has gone.
The structural consequence is not dramatic. The building does not need a special frame. It needs the right decisions made in the right order, and most of those decisions are about the floor and the underside of the roof rather than the span.
Spilled syrup is worse than spilled water
Water evaporates. Syrup does not. A spill that is hosed down becomes a thin film that dries to a sticky layer on the slab, on the base of the columns, on the bottom flange of every beam within reach.
That layer holds moisture against the steel for as long as the line runs. It is the reason a bottling hall shows base corrosion earlier than a comparable food plant, even where the same coating system was specified.
The practical answer is falls and drains in the slab, and a detail at the column base that can be cleaned rather than a detail that traps material.
The line vibrates all shift, not once
Filling machines, conveyors and case packers produce continuous low-level vibration rather than a single impact. Continuous vibration is harder on a building than an occasional shock, because there is no recovery time.
What matters is that the line does not sit on a suspended slab that has a natural frequency near the machine's operating frequency. Where the line is at grade this is rarely a problem. Where the line is on a mezzanine, it becomes the first question.
The second question is whether the mezzanine is tied into the main frame or independent of it. Tying a vibrating machine floor into a light frame is how a building starts to hum.
Glass, cans and cartons want different rooms
The empty-container store, the filling hall and the finished-goods store have almost nothing in common. The store wants clear span and a level floor. The filling hall wants washable surfaces and drainage. The finished store wants volume and access.
Putting them under one roof is normal and usually correct. Treating them as one specification is not. The envelope that suits a dry pallet store is the wrong envelope for a wet filler.
High-level ventilation is not optional in a humid climate
Pasteurisers and hot fill lines release steam continuously. In a tropical or subtropical climate, that steam has nowhere to go except onto the underside of the roof, and from there onto the line.
Condensate dripping into an open filler is a quality failure that looks like a building failure, and it is usually resolved after the fact with a liner that adds weight and cost. Designing the high-level openings first is cheaper.
What I want before drawings
- The line layout with the wet zone and the dry zone marked.
- Whether any machine sits on a mezzanine, and the machine masses.
- The washdown method and the chemicals involved.
- Whether pasteurisation or hot fill is in the process.
- The incoming container and outgoing pallet handling method.
- The wind speed for the site in km/h from the applicable local code, not a round number.
A bottling hall is one of the few buildings where the floor specification decides how long the steel lasts. It is worth settling that before the frame is priced.
Written by Johnny Joe, who advises owners and project managers in Africa and South America on steel buildings. If this decision is live on a project, send the layout and the constraint that worries you and I will tell you what it changes.
Related: hygiene zoning as a plan decision · a floor problem before it is a building · corrosion class as a selection input · loads that arrive as vibration
