From the top down
Whether a six pack or a package of eighteen: a new HEUFT development for the top-down inspection only lets those trays pass which fulfil the specific quality requirements of the food / beverage fillers.
Lightweight, flexible and practical: shrink wrap trays are the ideal outer packaging especially for PET bottles – provided that they are complete and of the correct brand with safely sealed filled containers. However the package in question must not reach the market under any circumstances if a container is missing or leaks. The same applies to a tray where a bottle with an incorrect closure has slipped in by mistake. The technology leader has extended the HEUFT VGX series for the specific detection of such defects.
The new development for an optical top-down inspection checks the completeness of the packed bottles as well as the presence, colour and integrity of their closures immediately after the sleeve tunnel. Missing individual closure parts are detected just as reliably as a non-brand closure colour or the absence of the complete closure.
Specifically detecting and individually classifying objects
The compact device photographs each individual tray on the conveyor from the top down using homogeneous LED illumination and two colour cameras. The detection pictures generated in this way are corrected with regard to perspective and put together into high resolution top views which show the complete surface of the outer packaging in real time.
Various types of packaging characteristics can not only be specifically detected but also taught in by means of the integrated HEUFT reflexx² image processing system and be individually classified as good, faulty or tolerable. For example a special offer imprint on the film can be characterised as a good object in order to rule out an unintentional rejection of the tray. The result: only those packages with full containers are removed from the production flow which really do not meet the specific quality requirements of the food / beverage filler.
Rejecting faulty trays
A special case rejector such as the HEUFT xtray is used for this. Alternatively the emission of a warning signal and / or a conveyor stop signal is possible for the manual removal of a tray identified as being faulty. This prevents outer packaging with incomplete, not safely sealed or non-brand contents reaching the market.
The new development completes the HEUFT VGX series for a precise final check of packages with full containers. A specific top-down inspection of shrink wrap trays is now also possible in addition to proven functions such as, among other things, the X-ray based fill level detection of containers in a case or the reliable identification of out of shape beverage cases. The system inspects up to 5,000 outer packages per hour at a maximum conveyor speed of 420 mm/second. It attracted a great deal of interest at the FachPack 2013 exhibition in Nuremberg – successful installations prove its practical suitability.
