Sales success with inspection systems for PET beverage preform production

IntraVis Vision Systems of Germany have recently announced the successful sales & installations of their Sample PreWatcher® machinery to Coca Cola in Halle, Germany and two large suppliers for Coca Cola in the USA.

 The Sample PreWatcher® is a detailed inspection machine for preforms. It is placed directly behind high-performance injection preform machines, and it randomly analyses the quality of newly produced preforms. The Sample PreWatcher® inspects the geometric preform characteristics, including measuring the length, diameter and wall thickness. It also inspects for ovality, form changes, material errors and also identifies cavity numbers for alarm monitoring for repetitive faults. It has a speed of 20 preforms/ minute.

Through rotation and multiple pictures a 360⁰ view of the preform is generated, and the smallest contamination can be detected including colour variations.

The machine also examines for irregularities at the injection point and checks the neck finish for scratches, notches and diameter irregularities.

The continuous batch QA sampling ensures high productivity, particularly with today’s high cavitation (144 cavity) fast cycle systems that produce 50,000+ preforms per hour. Conventional manual QA usually takes 1-2 hours and therefore has the potential to send 100,000 preforms to scrap due to the time delay in checking and identification.

IntraVis are a global supplier of video inspection systems for monitoring quality in the Plastics and Packaging Industries, and have over 1600 systems installed in over 24 countries. The Vision machines are designed to perform in-line inspection of plastic, glass & metal packaging and components and to find and eject defects ranging from the shape, colour, contamination, or dimensional variances.