Olmec UK has designed and installed an End of Line inspection system that utilises infrared (IR) imaging technology, at a leading manufacturer of woundcare products.
Introduced to replace “unreliable” human inspection, the new system links directly to the outfeed of the existing packaging machine, which seals the woundcare product into a 4-sided pouch.
According to vision systems specialist Olmec UK, it has been designed to inspect for empty pouches or pouches with the incorrect amount of dressings and dressings trapped in seals.
Mounted between two conveyor belts, the system features a single, 2048-pixel line scan camera equipped with IR Lens pass filters mounted above the line, and an IR light mounted underneath.
The system is capable of inspecting the 100 products per minute arriving from the packaging machine, and the movement of packages along the belt below the high resolution line scan camera results in high quality images.
“At an IR wavelength of 880nm the paper packaging material transmits far more light than the products inside, allowing the presence and position of the product to be easily verified, including whether it is trapped in the seal,” the company says.
All products that are ‘out of spec’ are automatically rejected, while ‘good’ product is transferred to an existing collator where the products are positioned in an easy way for the operators to gather them up and package them, with provision made to stop the line in the event of a false reject or false acceptance.
www.olmec-uk.com
