Application of the Week: Bottle Gripper

Welcome to another installment of our application series, where we spotlight real-world 3D-printed applications that solve practical challenges across industries.

Each article showcases a specific component or part designed in-house at UltiMaker and used by our customers, highlighting the design process, material choices, and key benefits over a traditionally manufactured counterpart.

In this article, we’re looking at a 3D-printed bottle gripper, a precision-engineered tool that plays a vital role in bottling production lines. Let’s explore how this part was created and why 3D printing was the optimal solution.

Streamlining production

Another design by Jeremy Evers, our Senior Technical Sales Engineer, the bottle gripper securely holds glass bottles by their necks during various stages of the production process, including transport, filling, capping and labeling.

The bottle gripper ensures that bottles remain stable and properly aligned, an important task when considering the high-speed operations they’re involved in where even minor misalignment can lead to costly production stops or damaged products.

Resources saved

Traditionally manufactured bottle grippers, usually through injection or compression molding techniques, have a time-consuming and expensive manufacturing process.

The design and testing of master molds are done via subtractive manufacturing methods (e.g. CNC milling) out of metal which implicitly run at a higher cost and offer less flexibility for customization.

However, 3D printing allows for the rapid production of these critical components as they can be rapidly prototyped and iterated to ensure that they meet the exact needs for the various shapes and sizes of bottles they manipulate and can be manufactured in a matter of hours rather than days when compared to a machined equivalent.

For comparison, the specific bottle neck gripper shown above costs half of what a traditionally sourced part would (saving ~301€ per part) with vastly faster lead times(traditionally machined part lead time estimated at ~835 days).

Material options

For materials, there is a plethora of great choices depending on the specific manufacturing needs, for reference here are a few of the materials we also covered in our applications of 3D printing in automated packaging article:

• Polymaker CoPA - Low friction coefficient, impact resistant
• Igus iglidur i150 - EU 10/2011 certified for food contact, self-lubricating, easy to print
• Igus iglidur i180 - High load and wear resistance
• Lehvoss 50588 - Magnetically detectable, FDA food safe certified, available in blue
• UltiMaker PPS CF - Easy to print, extreme stiffness, high temperature resistance(HDT B of over 230℃ after printing)
• UltiMaker PET CF - Easy to print, dimensional stability, high toughness, available in blue

If you found this application as interesting as we did and would like to explore options on how you can leverage the advantages of 3D printing in our own business, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.