Swing stopper and rubber seal inspection on bottles

The trend towards craft and cellar beers in the beverage industry is seeing a return to the traditional swing-top bottle. For the fully automatic filling industry, this type of closure represents a challenge in terms of handling and hygiene.

Thanks to a machine vision system contaminations, damages and mixing of closures of the market competitors can be detected and rejected from further processing. Only one hundred percent quality offers the end consumer a high-quality product in terms of taste and appearance.

During the filling and sealing process, the swing stopper is already brought into a position necessary for visual inspection. With the help of a 2D color camera, contaminations, damages or aging (porosity) of the rubber seals can be detected. Another 2D monochrome camera checks the logo of the respective brand on the outside as well as the wire hanger for its correct mechanical geometry. Damaged closures are fully automatically rejected by the machine and fed to a reworking process.

The system visualization provides the system operator with all the necessary information about the detected fault characteristics and can therefore directly influence the upstream process steps.

The flexibility of the systems allows integration into new systems as well as into existing systems as part of a retrofit.