Banner Engineering was recently approached by a company that brews and bottles many popular brands of beer in the United States to supply a solution for a unique problem they had on high speed rotary bottle fillers.
The rotary fillers dispense beer into bottles travelling at speeds of up to 900 bottles per minute. Periodically a spreader washer or a vent tube may become loose and drop into a bottle or onto the line. Beer will continue to dispense but the bottles will not fill correctly and product will be wasted. If undetected, affected bottles may be capped, packaged and even shipped, resulting in the product having to be recalled. The company needed a solution capable of detecting spreader washers on the vent tubes as well as loose or missing tubes. However, the movement of the rotary filler and the wet wash-down environment made close proximity deployments difficult and the range required for a remote solution could compromise inspection reliability.
Banner offered the popular iVu TG vision sensor as a solution. The company installed an iVu sensor at target level, with two air knives to protect it from spray and prevent associated interference. A 50 mm C-Mount lens with extender lengthens the sensor’s working distance and allows it to be deployed away from the target while providing the resolution needed to detect loose or missing vent tubes as well as missing spreader washers.
Configured as an area sensor, the iVu TG inspects for spreader washer and vent tube location and presence within 16 milliseconds. The operator defines the region of interest using the remote 90 mm diagonal colour flat-panel touch screen. If a washer drops below the region – indicating a loose tube – or if the washer is missing, an output from the iVu is used to stop the filler. The operator can then remove any affected product, correct the problem and get the filler working again with minimal downtime.
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