The 600-mm Powerade Sports bottle is injection stretch blow molded of PET by way of Krones NitroHotfill technology. The challenge involved was to develop an extremely lightweight, eco-friendly hotfill bottle with a 38-mm closure. This was successfully accomplished in full, as the container went from 33 to 24 g.
The NitroHotfill technology begins with what Krones calls a Relax Cooling (RC) process. A special cooling and stretching rod cools the bottles from inside while they are blown from the preform state. The bottles can be produced with a minimized weight and without the vacuum panels typically required to keep PET bottles from deforming as hot-filled bottles cool and internal vacuum pressure forms. Also possible with NitroHotfill is a flatter, design-optimized bottle base rather than the petaloid base so often seen today.
