PACKAGING, CODING & LOGISTICS
Is that package sealed correctly? Inline package seal integrity testing
Every year, factories worldwide turn out something like a trillion units of film packaging for food, cosmetic, pharmaceutical and consumer technology products and naturally, if the packaging seal has been compromised consumers are not happy.
Y
ears ago children went to the local milk bar to spend their pocket money asking for “two cobbers, a musk stick and three Lypties”. The shop owner put the lollies in a small white paper bag and scrunched the bag closed. Now, however, the lollies are pre-packaged and purchased from supermarkets. The lollies are not all that is pre-packaged — almost everything is. Ninety percent of this packaging is manufactured using thermal contact processes; in other words, sealed with the aid of hot tools. During these processes, the packaged goods can sometimes get into the seam and prevent it from sealing properly. Currently, manufacturers generally have to rely on spot checks to catch these 14
July/August 2016
packaging faults. If incorrectly sealed food or medical product packaging ends up on supermarket or pharmacy shelves, it can impair the product quality or shorten its shelf life — to say nothing of harming the manufacturer’s reputation. In the future, a thin-film temperature sensor will allow companies to carry out fast and reliable inline detection and rejection of packaging that has been incorrectly sealed.
Thin-film sensors for inline monitoring of the packaging process Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes for Mechanics of Materials IWM in Freiburg and for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV in Dresden have developed a method that will enable manufac-
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