Automated Beverage-Container Opening System

MolsonCoors wanted a machine to safely depressurize sealed beverage containers at high-energy venues — puncturing or un-capping cans and bottles automatically. On a five-person senior-capstone team I owned the orientation subsystem: the part that takes any container and centers and rotates it for the tools above.

The subsystem had to center and rotate any of four container sizes to one position — 12 oz cans, skinny cans, tall cans, and 16 oz pint bottles — and apply enough torque to spin a bottle for cap removal, all inside a 6″ × 6″ footprint. After weighing slew drives and rotary actuators (too slow, expensive, or oversized), I designed a drive-roller mechanism: a rack-and-pinion sets the spacing of opposed rollers to grip any diameter, and a driven roller spins the container in place.

Bench testing set the targets — about 20 in-lb to twist off an aluminum bottle cap and 30 lb to puncture a can — which I validated the drive rollers against. The team delivered a working prototype that depressurizes the specified containers on a build budget of about $935.

I owned the orientation subsystem end-to-end: the drive-roller and rack-and-pinion mechanism, shaft and roller sizing, CAD, fabrication (CNC, lathe, 3D printing), and bench testing — plus integrating it with the subsystems the rest of the team built.