Designing a milk packaging machine

[mrinalmani]

Hello everyone! As a small start-up I am thinking to setup a low cost milk processing plant, with a capacity of aprrox. 5000 liters per day. An important part of this plant is the milk packaging machine. In India a typical packaging machine costs around Rs. 600,000 (10K$). Unfortunately, this is the cost that I can afford for the entire plant and not for the packaging machine alone.
My target for the packaging machine is 1K$. (May sound foolish at once, but think twice, is it actually?)
The purpose of this thread is to help design a packaging machine right from scratch to the final product. Each and every bit of help and experience sharing will be deeply appreciated.
Thank you.

 

[barry]

Before you can design ANYTHING you need some kind of specification; you've given us nothing. What is actually involved in a "milk packaging machine"?

What does it do? Does it have a conveyor? What kind of package: cardboard? glass bottles? plastic? Does it need to move the filled 'packages' to crates? Where is the milk stored before packaging? Does it need to provide refrigeration? Do you need to pump the milk from a large container? How big? How far away? What is your throughput?

 

[mrinalmani]

Thanks for replying.
Consider the following to establish a starting point...

1. Before the milk enters the packing unit, it has been processed completely including refrigeration.
2. Processed milk is stored in a container (perhaps a 20 liters steel container

3. Photo of the desired packet is attached below

4. The packet is made from a long sheet of plastic film.
5. The film is folded to make a tube.
6. The tube is then sealed from the center by applying heat and pressure for a short duration, perhaps by pressing with hot a hot metal whose temperature is controlled.
7. A pipe is inserted in this tube, that will dispense milk.
8. Before the milk is injected, the lower end of the tube is clamped by hot metal and thus sealed.
9. Milk is dispensed.
10. The tube with sealed bottom is then slided downwards and the upper end is also sealed and cut from the parent tube.
11. The following pictures of existing machines will explain better.

 

[barry]

This sounds like considerably more than US$1K, just from an engineering standpoint, not even considering actually BUILDING a machine. Unless certain elements of the machine are already available (e.g., the heat-sealing station and the plastic feed mechanism) this is a pretty formidable task to design a reliable, working machine.