High-volume blow molding machines made by Sidel now incorporate the Intellispec BNS Vision inspection system from Pressco. Said to be the latest in PET container inspection technology, the Intellispec product provides a comprehensive inspection of 100% of the containers made on Sidel’s SBO blow molders. The inspection includes critical areas including base, neck, sidewall, and the seal surface of the neck finish. Real-time data from the inspection is constantly collected and made available to the user of the Sidel machine so that the process can be continually monitored and improved.
“One of the things we like about the Pressco technology is that it’s proactive instead of reactive,” says Sidel’s Greg Luka, technical director of blowing and coating products. “By analyzing a bottle’s critical dimensions while it’s still in the blow molder, you eliminate the need to execute such activities downstream in a secondary operation. Based on this real-time data, we can eject a bottle before it gets downstream.”
In addition to preventing defective containers from ever getting near a filling machine, the Intellispec system incorporates Pressco’s patented correlation process monitoring capability. Essentially a system of proximity and through-beam sensors in combination with proprietary software, this monitoring capability keeps track of all machine component positions at all times. Consequently, all defects can be directly correlated with the blow molder component that caused them. The Intellispec software even produces a convenient graph illustrating the correlation. Whatever is causing the defect—a blow mold, an infeed arm, an outfeed arm, or one of the many spindles that carry preforms through the warming tunnel—a user of a Sidel blow molder knows quickly which machine component is the culprit. This can bring an enormous reduction in time spent troubleshooting, says Luka.
Also detected and recorded by the Intellispec system are real-time section weights, says Luka.
“In a more conventional operation that does not incorporate an Intellispec system,” says Luka, “a quality control person takes a bottle off-line and cuts it with a hot wire to determine values for various sections. With the Intellispec system in place, there’s no need to do this. It’s done automatically as the bottle is still in the transfer device just before exiting our machine.”
“Intellispec lets us take a look at material distribution more effectively than ever before,” says Sidel’s Michel Picandet, vice president of sales and marketing. “We gain a perfect understanding of where bottle quality stands.”
