Zero-defect glass containers

TECNALIA, together with the company VIDRALA, has implemented a detection system for these bubbles to ensure the manufacture of zero-defect containers.

The goal of glass packaging manufacturing companies is based on meeting their clients’ needs with a competitive cost, respecting the requirements of all the components of the environment, with prevention being the best way to achieve it. During the manufacturing process of glass containers, so-called bubbles may appear, mainly due to the high temperatures and parameters of the melting furnace of the raw materials. This defect entails the rejection of the containers affecting the companies’ production.

The system, which is installed inside the furnace, consists of a linear camera with a telecentric lens and specific lighting that captures the image. This image is processed on a specific PC-based platform through software that reconstructs the image of each bottle and after several image conditioning algorithms and bubble search, determines the number of bubbles per container, taking into account their density and other parameters.

To date, statistical control has been performed in the laboratory. With this new vision system 100% of the bottles are inspected and with the results obtained, trends are collected, analysed and on doing so we can act on the furnace parameters to avoid the possible formation of future bubbles. In this way, the quality of the containers is further strengthened, generating fewer rejects and improving the production results.

Additionally the system is flexible, so that it adapts to different container diameters, shapes and colours, as well as to the speed variation of the production process, up to 250 bottles/min and with a resolution capacity of up to 0.1 x 0.1 mm².

Contact: Jone Echazarra