UK MARKET
Bridgend plant in south Wales. ‘JLR has put in thousands of
robots over the last few years. Tey’ve also created tens of thousands of jobs; those jobs wouldn’t be there if they hadn’t put competitive factories into the UK,’ Wilson said. ‘Tat’s one of the lessons we can learn from what the automotive industry has been doing.’ Te UK government has
developed an industrial strategy and commissioned the Made Smarter Review, a report led by Professor Juergen Maier, CEO of Siemens UK, looking at the benefits of digital technology. Te UK government has also increased the Annual Investment Allowance to £1m, for firms to offset investments against tax. ‘UK manufacturers should be using this benefit to help fund their investment research,’ Wilson said. Wilson said that there are
VISION TO CUT DOWNTIME FOR PHARMA PRODUCTION LINE CHANGES
Crest Solutions has carried out a study to identify how vision technology can reduce downtime during pharmaceutical production line changeovers. The firm believes pharma manufacturing plants could save significantly by installing cameras on the lines to help with clearances when changing batches. Phil Dearnaley, at Crest Solutions, said, at the recent UKIVA machine vision conference, that manufacturing lines can be down 50 per cent on the day when the plant switches to a different batch of medicine.
Irish vision integrator Crest Solutions spent 18 months looking at how pharmaceutical production companies carry out line changes and where cameras can be placed to assist the process. Dearnaley said that line changeovers are ‘time consuming, expensive, full of risk, and a lot more difficult than they need to be’. He said that in one 10-line facility,
which runs 12 hours a day, five days a week, each batch would take eight hours to produce, while a line change could take four hours. He said this particular facility lost around 870 production days per year on line changes – for the 10 lines – equating to £350,000 per year.
The aim would be to position cameras at line cleaning hotspots to make sure the line is completely clear of tablets before the new line is set up. At the moment the line is inspected manually during changeovers. The cameras would assist the engineer to make their inspections, rather than replacing checks.
Cameras could also be positioned in hard-to-reach places, where the machine would otherwise need to be dismantled to ensure the line is properly flushed out. According to Dearnaley, line clearances currently take too long, they are not repeatable, and they are physically arduous, involving
taking apart production machines. In an article for Imaging and Machine Vision Europe, Crest Solutions’ Conor O’Kelly noted new regulations have led to a big ramp-up of serialisation in the pharmaceutical sector. Crest has even had requests to embed engineers at manufacturing sites to provide support for serialisation cameras and other machine vision cameras.
He said: ‘For the first time in three or four years, we’re starting to see the machine vision budget be replenished for certain organisations, as serialisation isn’t dominating their in-process quality control spending in the way it has. Engineering managers are getting back to addressing the kind of topics that they previously knew were there, but they just didn’t have the budget for in the past few years. ‘So, I would definitely say that custom vision applications for in-process quality control are now coming back.’
1.1” 12 MEGAPIXEL 6.5 8.5 mm
mm mm 12 16 mm mm 25 35 50 mm mm
For Sony IMX253 & IMX304
> High resolution machine vision lens > Large image size of Φ17.6mm (C-mount) > Compact size > Kowa’s wide-band multi-coating > High transmission from visible to NIR
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