Project and solution
Today, the design and quality of packaging solutions have become one of the most important factors in how users “perceive” the quality of the final product. For products that are more or less equivalent, the quality, originality, and reliability conveyed by their packaging will undoubtedly make the difference when it comes to a customer’s potential choice.
The product packaging must convey solidity and integrity. It has happened to all of us: buying a more or less expensive and delicate item online and starting to worry when it arrives with a flap that has been incorrectly glued.
Most companies in the packaging sector apply a hot-melt adhesive to achieve this robustness in the final packaging. Some of these companies (usually those most concerned about quality perception at every stage of their product through to the end customer) carry out sampling for destructive quality control. Every certain number of boxes, operators take one at random and force and cut it to see whether the hot-melt adhesive has done its job correctly.
In a plant producing 24/7 with this approach to quality control, efficiency will be lost in the following areas:
- Defective boxes not detected, becoming a potential issue for the end customer.
- Correct boxes destroyed at the end of the line. Production time and material costs wasted.
- Operators using their time inefficiently.
Thanks to thermography and the use of cameras as simple, compact, and affordable as the FLIR Ax8, these checks can be carried out non-invasively, in-line, and 100% automated.
As it is a hot-melt adhesive, its temperature is much higher than that of the rest of the packaging, so it can be easily detected even from the opposite side to where it is applied.
Once installed and configured, the camera will be able to detect and assess on its own whether the adhesive pattern has been applied correctly, keeping the line’s PLC or DCS informed at all times with the OK/NOK status of each and every box, without the need for operator supervision.
