The Heuft spotter PH tracks down the smallest foreign particle and contamination such as dust, foil remnants or glass splinters inside pharmaceutical packaging filled with transparent liquids. Deviations in shape and chips, scratches or cracks on the container itself are also reliably detected. The device identifies so-called ‘black spots’, which are burn marks that can occur during the closing system, among other things, during the ampoule head inspection. Missing, damaged or non-brand vial crimp caps cannot escape the newly developed end of line system either.
For this, a belt drive guides the previously separated pharmaceutical containers straight past a total of nine optical detection modules and aligns each of them so that the bases, sidewalls, neck and head areas can be completely examined. The maximum possible detection reliability is achieved due to an interaction of LED illumination, specially arranged mirrors, CCD cameras and the Heuft reflexx high-performance image processing system.
The Heuft spotter PH removes faulty ampoules and small injection bottles from the production flow using an in-house developed rejection system. Container tracking through the complete device, and reject verification ensure that each package is properly inspected and each contaminated or damaged package is removed from circulation.
The straight-through system reaches throughput rates of up to 1,200 small pharmaceutical bottles per minute.