What can fillers and bottlers in the food and beverage sector do when they have to combat glass splinters or even breakages in the filling line? In cases such as these, Vetropack‘s customer service can now offer support with a new service and a sensor that measures precisely where glass containers are exposed to impact loads.
One Swiss food manufacturer – a Vetropack customer – recently had to confront these issues. Small splinters of glass were noticed on the line of one filling plant, but there was no obvious glass breakage.
To shed light on the matter, Vetropack’s customer service team used the new addition to their toolbox for the first time: the ShockQC in-line sensor from Masitek measures the forces and loads acting on a glass container with maximum precision.
Vetropack produced an exact replica of the glass container to be tested for the customer: in this case, a 390-ml European jar. This replica was fitted with a ShockQC sensor calibrated by the manufacturer. It then began its journey along the filling line together with a batch of other jars. A total of four tests were performed, each at different belt speeds. Replica and sensor passed through the entire line, starting with unpacking of the jars all the way to the final conveyor belt that carries the jars away in their finished cartons. The measured datasets were transmitted no less than 100,000 times per second to a tablet PC for visualisation on an easy-to-understand dashboard.
The result: an impact zone between the filler and sealing station where the jars are subject to shocks that exceed Vetropack’s guaranteed minimum impact strength by as much as 60 percent. The customer was now able to optimise their filling line exactly where improvement was really needed.
Michael Waltl, Technical Customer Service Manager at Vetropack, said, “Following on from the success of the first assignment, we have since used this service for several other interested parties – and we were able to provide rapid assistance every time. Now we’re looking forward to helping the next customers optimise their lines – quickly and easily, with a results-oriented method that involves no unnecessary effort or expense.”