An important application for Stirling plants nowadays is the supply of liquid nitrogen to the beverage industry for nitrogen dosing systems. Softdrink packaging worldwide is shifting from heavy glass towards ultra light plastic bottles. This requires drastic measures to prevent the bottles from collapsing during transport when packed trays are placed on top of each other. Their inherent fragile structure can easily be made stronger by pressurizing the bottles.

The perfect way to pressurize is by simply adding a drop of liquid nitrogen in the bottle. The rapidly evaporating liquid nitrogen will remove the oxygen from the bottle. Immediately afterwards, before all liquid nitrogen has evaporated, the cap is screwed on top. The remaining and still evaporating liquid nitrogen pressurizes the container. The thin plastic bottle thus becomes a very strong structure resisting impacts and loads. A positive side effect of nitrogen dosing is that removing the oxygen from the bottle also improves the live of the shelve and the quality of the bottled product so oxidation from enclosed atmosphere can no longer take place.

Bottling with dosing requires an uninterrupted supply of liquid nitrogen. Not having liquid nitrogen available means interruption of production with possibly long start-up times. All Stirling nitrogen plants are completely self sufficient in producing liquid nitrogen of high purity. Highly reliable and independent of any logistic problem of bulk suppliers.

Few companies in the world are capable of injecting the liquid nitrogen drops into the bottles at high speeds. If requested by the user Stirling Cryogenics co-operates with the suppliers of these nitrogen dosing systems to supply the beverage industry with a complete solution, including the proper interfacing between Stirling equipment and equipment from other suppliers.

Products
For use in applications as described the following Stirling Cryogenics products may be considered:

• StirLIN liquid nitrogen production plants