An essential requirement in the food industry is to ensure product traceability. Market demands in this segment are constantly increasing, and the industry is experiencing a steady rise in sales. As a result, manufacturers need to adapt their production methods, making them more efficient in order to remain competitive. Barcode readers and flow sensors are part of the solution, and ifm electronic can assist with seamless product tracking in production and compressed air savings through energy monitoring, combined with simple and full integration into the digital network.
Tracking the product
One of ifm’s customers is an international company producing snack foods, and it is one of the leading manufacturers of potato crisps. The company needed to seamlessly track and trace the product from production to end user via codes printed on the packaging, and a scalable and easy to integrate solution was sought. To meet this requirement, ifm barcode readers were installed at the customer‘s site for the tracing of products.
O2I5XX code readers from ifm are now used for product tracking on the production plants. Here, the simple connection via IO-Link also plays an essential role. Another benefit is that the price of the code readers is very attractive compared to the products previously used by the customer.
Energy monitoring
Another application for sensors in food production is energy monitoring. The aim here is to increase overall equipment efficiency in order to reduce unit costs.
Compressed air and nitrogen are important parts of the process. Compressed air is used in the pneumatic systems of the machines, and nitrogen is filled into the packaging before sealing to extend the shelf life of the products. However it is very important to contain costs. With the aim of including these two media into the energy monitoring system, the customer was looking for suitable flow sensors.
For this purpose it opted for flow sensors from ifm’s SDX5/X6 series. These met the required specifications, were cost effective and could be easily integrated. With the integrated, IO-Link interface, their connection via the Al1920 IO-Link masters supplied by ifm was also easy. Thanks to the digital connection, the measured values were directly available in the production plant’s network and could be processed both in the PLC and in the higher level energy management system. The simple digital integration via IO-Link was one of the main reasons to choose this solution.
The result has been an enhanced energy management system and improved production traceability for the customer. Benefits include:
• Implementation according to individual customer requirements.
• Easy integration into the energy monitoring system.
• An inexpensive and easy to install solution.
• Monitoring of overall plant effectiveness.
The customer was impressed with the technical support provided by ifm‘s application engineers, who in each case could present an ideal solution from a technical point of view. Given the positive experience, other locations will follow.
A universal solution for production and logistics
The O2I multicode reader verifies and analyses codes and text. It detects 1D and 2D codes, and text elements, and analyses their quality within a few milliseconds. The number of elements to be detected is irrelevant as the O2I can evaluate several codes or text elements, and their combination, with only one image capture. This makes the multicode reader a universal solution in production and logistics processes where the presence of codes and text information is to be checked for quality or used for product tracking. It can be quickly set up for simple applications directly on the device. More complex tasks can be implemented just as easily by means of the award-winning ifm Vision Assistant.
All in one system
The O21 now also detects fonts and characters in addition to the familiar 1D and 2D codes (OCR). It ensures reliable identification even under difficult conditions such as changing extraneous light or shiny surfaces.
Many benefits
The advantages of the O21 series include:
• Versatile use for quality and process control in production and logistics.
• Detects and verifies text and codes alike.
• High performance thanks to fast evaluation of several different codes and text passages in one image.
• Reliable detection even in cases of extraneous light and challenging surfaces.
• Easy parameter setting on the device or via the ifm Vision Assistant.
A video of the O21 multicode reader can be viewed at https://tinyurl.com/3ms3c9bm
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