Patent ID: 7540235

Claim:
A device for pressing together empty plastic containers, comprising: a housing having a fill-in opening and exit opening; a cutting and pressing unit disposed in the housing, said cutting and pressing unit containing at least two rollers that are disposed at a distance from one another with reference to their axes of rotation and a plurality of strippers; and means for driving and controlling the cutting and pressing unit, wherein each of the rollers, when viewed in a direction along the axis of rotation, has two types of segments, and wherein the segments that alternately follow one another along said axis possess different outside diameters from each other, and wherein when the rollers are installed, said segments having a larger outside diameter in each roller are formed by cutting disks, the cutting disks are offset relative to one another and are disposed with their circumferential surfaces partially overlapping one another, each of the circumferential surfaces possess at least one groove, wherein each of the segments having a smaller outside diameter is formed by a plurality of pressure disks, said segment having the smaller outside diameter possess several recesses that are directed radially inward, reaching to a core diameter of the roller, to form the pressure disks which are each spaced apart from one another by an amount of a width of the recess, so that containers being passed to said segments are perforated in partial regions by the segments having the larger diameter and at the same time, regions adjacent the perforated partial regions are pressed together by the segments having the smaller diameter which are disposed axially next to the segment having the larger diameter so that the containers leave the exit opening of the device compacted into a panel shape, and wherein the strippers are disposed between the cutting and pressure disks.