My best experience continued in the past few weeks in the Hawassa millennium Pepsi cola plant.

I get
the chance to visit and understand what really is going on the following rooms and plant:

- Filler room - Chiller room

- Boiler room - Syrup room

5, December,2019 – Filler Room: Filler machine is an automatic machine which is used to fill the bottles
with their respective products. it’s the final operation taking place in the filler room after mixing,
crowning and inspection operations. In this room three major operations will take place:

1. EBI (empty bottle inspection): an operation aided by programmable logic control which inspects
bottles with different problems by inspecting: Base of the bottle, impurity, inner side of the
bottle, neck finish, caustic, IR water amount, tall and short bottles.
2. Mixing: an operation which is used to mix and proportionate the dissolved sugar and flavor
concentrates collectively known as syrup from the syrup room and treated water from water
treatment room and co2 from carbon dioxide plant and carbonate the syrup.
3. Filling: an operation where the finished product is transferred into the bottles must be tested
using high pressure co2: to rinse the bottle and take the atmospheric air out and to test the
strength and if the bottle blows it will be washed.
4. Crowning: an operation which is used to seal the filled bottles with pressure resistant closure. It
uses cork to cover the top of the bottle and proceed to the ancillary operations such as check
mat (used to differentiate between uncrowned, unfilled and filled bottles), Videojet (to print the
date, time and company’s code).

11, December, 2019- Wednesday - Boiler Room: this room is one of the company’s essential units. It
mainly produces steam for syrup room, bottle washer & crate washer. In this room the following major
operations takes place:

1. Filtration: water treatment typically begins with sediment filters to remove suspended solids
and water treatment for the soft water coming from the water treatment room.
2. Softening: two softeners are used to remove calcium, magnesium, and other metal cations.
These chemicals cause ‘hard water’ and contribute to a scale build up in the boiler’s water tank.
3. Soft water storage tanker: a temporary water container made of metal which is used to store
the softened water and the water recycled back from the condensation tank. Here, a sudsteam
80 SCP chemical is added in the tanker to avoid the development of algae and scale which will
reduce the volume of the tanker.
4. Boiler: a boiler is a closed vessel in which fluid or generally water is heated. The fluid does not
necessarily boil. The heated or vaporized fluids exits the boiler for use in various process or
heating application. It is an operation used to create a steam by applying heat energy to water
with inputs such as: soft water, light fuel oil, gas oil, LPG gas, sudsteam 80 SCP and others. The
boiler operates at 184°C and at 2.8 bar. The boiler is equipped with different equipment such as:
thermomotor (which sacks an air basically Oxygen for combustion purpose), electrical spark,
motor to diffuse light fuel oil into the fire, sensors and safety valve.
5. Product distribution: after the steam is produced it passes through pipes with decreasing
heights to get the steam more pressurized and passes to a temporary steam storage to be
distributed to syrup room and bottle washer room.

1
19, December, 2019 - Thursday - Syrup Preparation Room: the syrup which is one of the main inputs in
the mixing machine found in the filler room is prepared in this room. it’s a huge room having different
operations taking place in it. Three major process are done here:

1. Sugar syrup (simple syrup): it’s is prepared by dissolving the sugar with treated and hot water at
certain temperature and other parameters. The syrup room contained conveyor( equipped with
granulator to reduce size of the sugar to provide more dilution and used to transport the sugar
into the dissolving tank), dissolving tank (to dilute the sugar into the prepared hot water),
filtration equipment such as horizontal filter tank, police filter tank to avoid thread like
components and fibers, chiller (for bringing down the temperature of the simple syrup from 80°
C to 20°C, circulation tank( to prepare cake using celato or high flow to purify the simple
syrup),CIP preparation tank( for cleaning purpose),flavor and concentrate store room, mixing
tank( specially used for mixing flavor and concentrate with the prepared simple syrup in the
case of Mirinda and other products except Pepsi).
2. CIP (cleaning internal part): an operation taking place when cleaning the internal parts of tanks
and other unit operations is needed. CIP is prepared by following the following methods: filling,
heating, caustic preparation and caustic flush. And also, it’s automation will have two
production matrices namely: 3 steps (pre- flushing, caustic, caustic flush, cool down, flushing)
and 5-steps (pre- flushing, caustic, caustic flush, hot water, cool down, flushing)
3. Product syrup : this is the end product by which the flavor, the simple syrup and concentrate
are found in. it is stored in a storage tank or tower where he flavor and the concentrates are
added in the top in case of Pepsi and in other they will be added directly in to mixing tank.

26, December, 2019 – Wednesday -Chiller and Air Compressor Room: a chiller is a machine that
removes heat from a liquid via a vapor compression or absorption refrigeration cycle. First, water from a
storage tank which have two compartments one for the raw water and one for the cooled water will be
pumped by a centrifugal pump towards the chiller to be cooled by ammonia and proceeds to the second
compartment to get pumped to air cooled, syrup and other places. And the ammonia gets recycled back.

Air compressor: is an operation to compress the atmospheric air or increasing the air’s atmospheric
pressure to higher pressure by sacking an air into it and proceeds to air dryer to remove any moisture
and produce a compressed air, then by removing it’s impurity the final product will be directly pushed to
the pneumatic valves found in packer unpacker room and others…

Case study: I found cases which I am confused of because the sources and the information’s are not full.
For instance, I wanted to study and give solution for the bad smell (unpleasant odor) in the waste water
treatment but the operators don’t know about the source expect suggesting their guess. The second and
which I am really thinking about it is replacing the LPG gas used in the boiler room with a hydrogen gas
which will be very easy to get and good at initiating a fire. It’s easily made just by using water and some
electric input. So, in the coming days I am planning to do this case study especially if the waste water
case study won’t work due to time reason.

About the company: the company has been well specially after the month of October, every body has
been encouraging me, helping me to carry out my studies specially regarding the case I wanted to study
which I thought nobody will be concerned. They try to suggest and advise me to do better by offering to
use their own laboratory.