New unit enhances the Efficiency of Closure Inspection

In beverage bottling plants, the process of closing the containers constitutes a point of crucial importance for the product's overall quality.

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Until now, quality-assurance solutions have used a combination of the reflected- and transmitted-light methods, but that requires quite an elaborate set-up. In order to meet more stringent quality standards and keep pace with innovative improvements like tethered caps and lightweight while simultaneously upgrading the existing methods, Krones has developed the 360° closure inspection unit.

This new unit marries a precisely defined lighting system to a very high camera resolution. It measures the positions of the bottle's closure and neck finish in three-dimensional space. Based on that, it can determine their relative position to each other. As its accuracy is ten times higher than that of its predecessor model, it is possible to take ultra-precise measurements down to 20 micrometres or smaller, even with customary container height tolerances or slightly angled bottle necks. In this way, the process ensures leakproof integrity for all containers, thus saving time and effort for manual testing in the lab where only random checks on individual specimens are performed.