Trends: Page 598

Tamper-evident machinery

Simplicity Brightens Vision's Future

Vision processing is a difficult task requiring many calculations that must be done in real time or close to it. But in the past few years, microprocessors and digital signal processors reached performance levels that make it possible to process complex algorithms in the available time.

April 30, 2005

Filling/capping, dry

Arla Foods' Quest for "B2M" Integration

Arla Foods, the Danish dairy giant with annual sales of US$7 billion and global production facilities, is integrating high-level business information with its plant-floor information systems. The end result is impressive.

April 30, 2005

Controls & Machine Components

How the Cheese Slices

Cougar Automation Technologies’ customer, a large manufacturer of processed cheese, had both a plant-floor problem and a “back-office” problem.

April 30, 2005

Controls & Machine Components

Brewing Up Standards

Even though bringing standards together in an enterprise-wide solution is very new, there are companies that are now reaping the benefits.

April 30, 2005

Controls & Machine Components

Promises, Promises, What's in it for me?

To many process engineers, packaging equipment can look like something from another planet. Often the controls part of a machine can be rudimentary in their view, and troubleshooting machines from many suppliers can be a headache to figure out.

April 30, 2005

Flow wrapping

PFM's new pharma-configured flow packer

PFM introduces a pharmaceutical flow packing with robotic infeed and vision capabilities

April 30, 2005

Controls & Machine Components

Schneider Electric: Industrial PCs

Schneider Electric introduces the Magelis® Smart iPC, a thin client for Ethernet architectures, and the Magelis Compact iPC, designed for embedding in compact machines or enclosures.

April 30, 2005

Controls & Machine Components

Motion control solution

Soft Servo Systems has released the SMP series, a new type of general motion controller with as many as 16 axes of high-end general motion control, an industry-standard soft PLC, and a Windows®-based GUI application in a single package.

April 30, 2005

Controls & Machine Components

National Instruments: PCI-based digitizer

National Instruments announces the NI PCI-5124, a PCI version of its 12-bit, 200 MS/s PXI-based digitizer. The NI PXI-5124 and NI PCI-5124 digitizers deliver more than 75 dBc spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) on two simultaneously sampled inputs with 150 MHz bandwidth.

April 30, 2005

Flexibles

People

Bimal Kalvani was named president of Alcoa Flexible Packaging.

April 30, 2005

Flexibles

The power of paperboard

For the 62nd time the Paperboard Packaging Council presents its awards to an assortment of paperboard packs that catch consumers’ eyes.

April 30, 2005

Contract Packaging

10 questions to ask when purchasing used machinery

Here’s how you can protect your company from getting ‘taken’ by learning about the dealer’s history and key relationships.

April 30, 2005