Contained Visual Inspection System
In the medicine industry, it is important to ensure there are no defects in tablets or capsules. However, it’s a challenging task when combining high-speed production where thousands of tablets are produced every hour with high safety standards for highly toxic medicine. Sometimes highly toxic products, which operators cannot touch, are required to be delivered free from defects. Moreover, when the industry is producing various medicines including tablets, capsules, and soft gels, there is a need for a machine that can inspect and sort each category of product with great accuracy.
Inspecting and sorting in high-speed medicine production
The Sensum Spine Hypo is an inspection and sorting unit for highly toxic products with a fully automatic mode of operation in which defected products are detected and separated automatically. The Sensum Spine Hypo unit inspects the entire surface of a product (tablet, capsule, and softgels) at a speed of up to 360,000 products per hour. The products are transferred in the inspection system with a vacuum. A combination of six-colour cameras is used to thoroughly inspect the product. The active sorting system separates defective products with compressed air which fall under gravity to a compartment for defective products, while the perfect quality product moves forward for packing. Sensum Spine Hypo can be trained to identify the defects in new products by providing defect-free samples of the product. It will automatically recognize its colour, shape, thickness, etc. Once it is trained for the new product, which usually takes 10 minutes, the unit is ready for operation.
Sensum Spine Hypo performs 100 percent visual inspection, meaning, it scans all sides of the tablets, capsules or softgels to find any defects. The defects it can check for include the presence of a foreign product, colour deviation, shape, cracks, coating defects, thickness, chips, lamination defects, uneven surfaces, engraving defects, dirt, dots, damaged edges, and damaged prints.
The machine protects against contamination using inlet and outlet air filtering, the negative pressure in the process area, and using separation of the process with a barrier (gaskets, seals, silicone sealing). The inlet air filtering protects the clean room from air backflow, while outlet air filtering removes the dust from exhaust air. The separation barrier is another security against contamination supplemented by negative pressure in the process area. Moreover, Spine Hypo also enables use of contained feeding and discharging systems, such as safe connection to IBCs containers and continuous liners.
Sensum Spine Hypo has options for dry and wet cleaning in containment and has glove ports for safe access and interaction without breaking the containment. Dry cleaning with aspiration enables the removal of excessive surface powder accumulated during inspection and wet cleaning can be used to remove airborne powders from the process area of the unit.
Benefits
- Highly autonomous inspection
- Safe inspection even for highly toxic products
- High throughput inspection and sorting
- Simple cleaning using dry/wet approach