Plan Automation Technology Blog

Evaluating Your Need for an X-Ray Inspection System

Posted by Mat Bedard on Wed, Jan 29, 2014 @ 16:01 PM

X Ray Inspection TechnologyIn today’s modern marketplace, it can be difficult to balance all of the different priorities that are a part of manufacturing different products. You want to make sure that each and every packaged product that exits your factory is made to the highest standard and is free of contaminants that could be harmful to your customers, yet you also want your inspection cycle to be short so that you can meet the demand for your products.

Without a reliable inspection process to assure the safety and quality of your product, harmful contaminants can make their way into the final product and cause harm to your faithful customers and result in costly product recalls that cripple your company’s public image. However, the inspection process that you use also needs to be fast and efficient, or else you will not be able to move product out of the factory fast enough to dominate store shelves.

To address the two-headed problem of meeting both quality and quantity needs, many companies have adopted the use of x-ray inspection devices to get fast, accurate, and reliable inspection results.

How do X-Ray Inspection Devices work?

X-Ray inspection devices such as the Eagle PI are, to put it simply, scanning devices. As a product passes through the scanner, the x-ray inspection device emits a pulse of electromagnetic waves, specifically waves in the x-ray spectrum. These waves pass through the object being scanned, and the machine interprets the distortions and reflections of these waves to produce an image in grayscale (kind of similar to the way that the first black and white cameras used reflected light from the flash of a bulb to produce an image on film, only x-rays pass can take a picture inside of an object).

Because x-ray waves have such a short wavelength, they can pass through many solid objects. However, not all objects allow these x-rays to pass with equal ease, which is why they’re often used in medical scans of patient’s bodies to find bone fractures, tumors, and other infections/foreign bodies in patients.

Undesirable objects that don’t allow x-rays to pass through such as glass, metal, stones and bones show up as dark spots in the grayscale image. The images from the item being scanned are compared to images from a predetermined acceptance standard by an automated computer program. Whenever a rejected product is detected, the computer’s software sends a signal to an automated rejection system to take the product out of the production line quickly and easily.

What Makes X-Ray Inspection Indispensable

Foreign body detection isn’t the only use for an x-ray inspection system. Modern advances in x-ray inspection technology make them sensitive enough to detect many other quality control-related issues, such as:

  • Compromised seals.
  • Check-Weighing. (ensuring that your products are consistent with indicated package weight).
  • Fill levels.
  • Missing or broken package contents.
  • Product length, width, area, and volume.

Things such as compromised seals and missing or broken packages are things that need to be identified to ensure the safety of your product to consumers, especially for consumable goods. A compromised or broken package is something that you would think would be easy to find with a visual inspection, but visual inspections take time and if the product packaging involves multiple layers, such as a non-airtight box around a sealed bag, a cursory inspection of the outer packaging with either a standard camera or a human quality assurance inspector will not find the burst packaging inside the box.

The unit mass, fill level, and product volume are less threatening quality control issues, but they are still important as they allow you to confidently state that your customers are getting a consistent amount of product for the money that they are spending. Analyzing product weight, width, area, and volume specifically allows x-ray inspection devices to find deformed, unattractive products. If a major part of your product’s appeal is in its visual presentation to the customer, automating the detection of reject products is an invaluable part of keeping the items that go to the shelf looking pristine for customers.

The detection of missing package contents covers not only missing products, but missing promotional items such as coupons, leaflets, and promotional gifts. X-ray inspection devices can even be programmed to ignore certain objects, such as the oxidizer packets in food products to avoid giving false positives. Using an x-ray inspection device helps you ensure that no customer misses out on your newest special offer being included with the packaging.

The Importance of X-Ray Inspection

Using x-ray inspection devices allows you to streamline your quality assurance process while making it more thorough and reliable. These devices can give you a detailed inspection of your products far faster than slower, less efficient manual inspection methods.

The speed of the process saves you time and labor, giving you the ability to move more product out of your factory for less money spent per product. The accuracy of x-ray inspections gives you and your company peace of mind, knowing that your products are vastly less likely to exit the production line with potentially lethal contaminants or gross deficiencies that could turn customers off of your product.

To learn more about how x-ray inspection devices can save you time and money, download our free ebook or contact us directly.

Learn More about X-Ray Inspection

To learn more about the capabilities of an X-Ray technology please download our free ebook, “X-Ray, More Than Just Foreign Body Detection

X-ray, More Than Just Foreign Body Detection - Plan Automation

Topics: X-Ray Inspection