täyttöaika

Täyttöaika (Finnish for “filling time”) is the amount of time required to fill a container, vessel, or space to a specified volume or level. The term is used in Finnish technical and industrial contexts and may appear in English texts as “fill time.” It is distinct from related concepts such as fill rate, throughput, and cycle time.

In practical terms, fill time is determined by the fill rate and the target volume: t = V / R, where V is the desired volume and R is the volumetric flow rate. Units are typically liters or cubic meters for volume and liters per minute or cubic meters per hour for rate. Real systems may introduce delays or non-constant flow due to pump dynamics, fluid properties, or head pressure.

Applications of fill time include packaging and bottling lines, chemical processing, water and wastewater treatment, storage tank filling, irrigation systems, and laboratory sample preparation. As a metric, it supports capacity planning, scheduling, and the identification of bottlenecks in a process.

Factors affecting fill time include the capacity of pumps or valves, fluid viscosity and temperature, head or pressure conditions, backpressure, entrained air, and control system response times. Accurate estimation often requires either straightforward calculations or dynamic modeling to account for variations.

Related terms include fill rate (flow per unit time), fill level (percentage of capacity), and cycle time (total time per unit in a process). For planning purposes, fill time provides a practical measure of how long a filling step will take under given operating conditions.