INDUSTRY FOCUS PACKAGING A TIME FOR REFLECTION
These days there is a vast array of choices for packs, cartons and bottles within the food and beverage industry. However, despite testing well in focus groups, these new designs can cause a major headache for packaging line operations. Phil Dyas, industrial sensor specialist for SICK UK, discusses the technology that can provide a solution to this problem
S
ensors which identify individual packs for critical automated processes such
as counting, picking or quality monitoring can find many modern pack designs more or less invisible. The use of transparent, reflective, dark or black matt packs could increase a line’s reject and wastage rates to a point where the operation starts to be uneconomic. Yet, optimal productivity remains critical for food, FMCG or pharmaceutical manufacturers supplying competitive markets. Unusual, angled or rounded pack shapes are also becoming more popular but could cause stoppages and down- time. Similarly, the temptation to maximise capacity to increase throughput and reduce costs per unit could result in crowding packs so close together that many sensors miss the millimetre gaps between packs. The unpalatable solution might have to be spacing out the packs and losing an opportunity for increased profitability. The solutions to these packaging
challenges lie not with one all-purpose, all-capable sensor, but in a range which offers the optimum price/benefit performance for a specific task, while providing enough capability to perform creditably outside the peak speciality.
THE NEW BLACK Take black as a background colour for a pack design. Tropical butterflies such as the Parides species from South East Asia use matt black on their wings as a way of hiding from their enemies in their jungle habitat. The reflectance of light from these
wings can be one percent or less thanks to the intricate surface structure. Even the most matt black cards and paints have around four to five percent reflectance. To the average sensor this is still like staring into a black hole. So, up until now, despite being loved by
the designers, matt black has been a virtual ‘no-no’ for high speed pack conveying lines, as sensors struggle to detect packs, even under bright lighting. Now a way has been opened to exploit
the style, glitz and glamour of matt black designs, with the capabilities of SICK’s new W2S family of sub-miniature photoelectric
20 MAY 2014 | AUTOMATION
separate packs on a line. DeltaPac can also detect changes in packaging shape, whether folded, radiused or faceted corners, at line speeds of up to 3m/s and 200,000 units an hour.
positioning sensors. The W2S can cope with reflectance levels down to one percent, thus opening the way to a new family of pack design possibilities.
BRIDGING THE GAPS Another issue facing the packing line manager can be overcrowding. Cost pressure to fit more and more packs onto the conveyor can be self defeating if the detector can’t tell when one pack ends and the next starts. The same sensor confusion often occurs with stylish rounded, radiused or facetted corners. Artificially increasing the spacing to help detection is an inadequate and expensive option. Confronting and solving these problems
is the remit of the new DeltaPac multi- task photoelectric sensor which boosts packaging productivity by making gap- free pack conveying achievable. Without sacrificing accuracy or risking frequent pile-ups, downstream quality and stoppages, it consistently detects a wide range of pack shapes at high production speeds and eliminates the need to
Above: tropical butterflies such as the Parides use matt black on their wings. The reflectance of light from these wings can be one percent or less
NOW YOU SEE ME... SICK’s sensor development engineers have also targeted difficult transparent, semi-transparent, shiny, highly reflective and uneven packaging surfaces on high speed lines. Transparency allows attractively coloured contents, such as beverages, sauces or condiments, to shine through the bottles and jars, and can substitute for more costly all over printing or pigmentation. However, most sensors struggle to pick up a clearly defined signal, and heat shrinking onto packing trays can create further multi-reflective clutter. The new TranspaTect photoelectric sensor delivers reliable and consistent
Above and below: technologies are enabling sensors to ‘see the light’ no matter how challenging the pack design
detection of transparent packaging in pharmaceutical, food and beverage processes. A key development was removing the requirement for a traditional reflector for the light beam, which can be inconvenient and difficult to accommodate and replace this by using a matt surface of a convenient machine component as a reference surface. With these enhanced performance
abilities, the new SICK sensor families could inject new life into conveying line efficiency, and free the constraints on the pack designers’ imaginations.
SICK UK
www.sick.co.uk T: 01727 831121
Enter 207 /AUTOMATION
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