Advanced carton inspection DEXA x-ray machine with extended analytics

Summary

The correct packing and inspection of cartons is important to processors and consumers. Cartons that are under-filled or packed incorrectly may become crushed creating a safety hazard, adding unnecessary freight cost and possible damage to plant/product. Cartons that contain incorrect product specification or contain contaminant may attract a discount or be rejected and at worst case cause a risk to consumers.

Scott Automation and Robotics recently completed a project investigating the use of DEXA technology to profile product inside closed cartons. A proof of concept system was successfully created and trialled.

Some preliminary trials to determine the chemical lean (CL) content of boxes has been conducted and shows a high level of confidence that CL will be able to be measured with the DEXA based hardware configuration. DEXA has been shown to be effective when scanning boxes as a method of detecting contaminant within product including such contaminants as foreign material and bone. This has been shown using the Scott DEXA X-Ray contamination machine platform.

With the ability to measure these carton traits an opportunity exists to build a carton scanning system that can provide both real-time control and reporting as well as historical reporting to the processor to ensure that cartons are reliably filled with the correct CL, packed efficiently and are free of contaminant and so that processors can measure and trend the performance of their operations.

Besides, there will be some improvement on contamination detection by developing a new computer hardware platform, updating the software framework, implementing a new contamination detection algorithm, improvements to detector degradation, utilising DEXA hardware and coding, utilising more accurate calibration methods, and improved safety. Based on the outcomes from the first stage carton fill and CL developments and the proven contaminant detection technology of the Scott contamination inspection machinery this project will combine the functionality of DEXA X-ray technology, carton fill inspection, contaminant detection, CL measurement and statistical analysis + reporting that can provide immediate feedback to operators and historical data to the processor to identify issues such as long-term inefficient use of carton space, CL packing performance and contaminant events.

At the conclusion of this project a production ready machine with the above functionality will be developed and demonstrated.