100-percent control of sealed seams

The bag packaging machine at Knorr in Heilbronn has already packed many millions of Fix products. In high-speed packaging processes, it is not surprising that isolated errors can occur during bag production, filling and final sealing.

Although these errors are in the range of less than two per mille, the quality manufacturer Knorr only tolerates a zero-error rate for the food trade. As a minimum error rate cannot be avoided due to wear and tear, the only way to exclude possible missing parts is to check the end products.

Integrated into the existing system, the machine vision system evaluates the quality of the sealing seams at incredible speed. In b/w mode of the camera, the fine relief of the welded sealing seams provides very good light-dark contrasts. Possible material overlaps or faulty welds are immediately detected and the product is rejected. An important quality feature is also the angle of the sealed seams to the outer edge of the bags. Using pattern recognition technology, the camera records the actual values and relates them to the tolerance values. In case of exceeding or falling below the tolerance values, the NOK signal is sent to the PLC, which takes the product out of the process. According to the motto: „The eye eats along“.

Thanks to the machine vision system, a personnel-intensive, manual inspection can be eliminated. The completely self-sufficient system can be installed in the existing plant without any modifications. Thus, the production flow is optimized and the output of the production is increased.