Baking & Snack - August 2018 - 124

INLINE SAFETY

Packaging equipment must
often be integrated with
object detection equipment
for efficiency and a highquality performance.
Formost Fuji

criminate very small pieces of
metal hidden within that signal."
Sometimes inspection equipment must be modified for better product accuracy. Mr. Gunnell recalled a
modification that was necessary for a customer that was
packaging a wide, square product. The X-ray machine's
beam inspected it from the top and through. After a few
days of this process, the customer discovered that, because of the product's width and height, the beam wasn't
reaching a small corner on each side or the furthest surface area of the square. As a result, the X-ray had to be
modified to reach the uninspected areas.
Equipment that's too sensitive or not sensitive enough
to properly inspect packaged products can also present
challenges, according to Bill Kehrli, vice-president of

Being conscious of where
the inspection equipment
should go is also key.
sales and marketing, Cavanna Packaging. "With metal
detectors, if it's too sensitive, then it kicks everything off
the line and picks up metal from all over the building.
The same goes with an X-ray," he said. "Or, if a shard of
metal or glass is so small, it doesn't get picked up and
goes through. There's not a 100% fail-safe system."

Fitting together puzzle pieces
More often than not, bakers will need to integrate various types of equipment to maintain or increase the
speed of production and achieve more accurate results.
This might require some modification to the equipment
to accommodate certain considerations.
"If you have a checkweigher, you have to remove vibrations; if you have a metal detector, you need to pay
attention to the conveyor design to move metal away
from the aperture," Mr. Gidman said. "Each of these machines has their own little quirks that need to be considered, so we tend to be aware of what's there and don't interfere with what's happening in front of or behind us."

124 Baking & Snack August 2018 / www.bakingandsnack.com

Being conscious of
where the inspection
equipment should go is also key.
"With a metal detector, we might
build a metal-free zone into our discharge conveyor and
mount the metal detector, so it's built directly into our
discharge conveyor right at the end of our wrap," Mr.
Gunnell said.
Fortress Technology often shares reject systems with
other processing or inspection equipment. Mr. Gidman
mentioned that the company is sometimes asked to install
multiple reject stations on its equipment: one for metal,
another for a checkweigher, a third for a vision system.
On the other end, Formost Fuji will combine reject
units on some lines or have multiple reject units in others. Cavanna Packaging integrates both mechanically and
electrically for effective communication. "If they give us
a fail signal, we will divert a product, maybe shut a line
down, maybe send another signal," Mr. Kehrli said.
However, integration might not always require merging machines. It could mean using the same algorithms
when data is collected in the same system. "Quite often,
data from the line is being fed back to a common collection system, and we need to ensure that what we're
sending is readable and compatible by whatever the baker's using," Mr. Gidman said. "That's the kind of thing
where a lot of bakers can really benefit from having their
equipment adapt to their common standards and then
collect that data and use it in a very sensible way."
Mr. Gunnell emphasized that bakers should communicate how equipment will be integrated up and down
the line. "From our standpoint, it's the ability to signal
and know what up- and downstream issues to monitor
in real-time and stop the machine if there's a problem,"
he said. "Communication is the key. The biggest thing is
to identify what the requirements are or aren't."
At Heat and Control, Don Giles, director of sales,
processing systems, said it's important for bakers and
equipment suppliers to work together to meet the needs
and expectations of a product. "We ensure quality by

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Baking & Snack - August 2018

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