2015-05-05

Control the wine level in your filling line

Receiving complaints for providing bottles with quantities of wine below the specified or legally admitted, or on the other hand a decrease in profits due to the wasted wine when providing above the planned quantity, these are consequences of a filling level control that is defective or non-existent.

To ensure that your product arrives to the client in the specified amount and thus avoiding customer dissatisfaction or a reduction of the expected profit, the solution involves the use of a filling level control system. 

Therefore, EGITRON has the pleasure to announce its new system: SANE – Filling Level Analysing System (Sistema de Análise do Nível de Enchimento).

Filling Level Analysing System 

SANE was essentially developed to analyse the filling level of all the bottles that go through a filling line. Up to a rate of 8000 bottles per hour it can identify the wine level (distance from the top of the bottle to the wine lever); the stopper length (distance between the bottle top to the end of the stopper) and the respective headspace (space between the wine and the stopper). It also has the ability of detecting bottles without any stopper. After being correctly set up, this system can monitor several types of bottles with various degrees of transparency and various heights and, if necessary, it also allows the addition of new bottle types.

SANE is fitted with the latest technology were artificial vision is concerned which allows a stricter control of all bottles due to the ability of taking measurements with a resolution of 0.1mm. In real production conditions, due to the instability caused by the belt movement, SANE can provide a resolution of 1mm. 

A brief description of how the system works: after the corking process the bottle goes through SANE’s detection area and its presence is detected by a photocell.
In this moment a photograph is captured and the camera processes the obtained information, identifying the transition areas, detecting the level and the remaining parameters. If the level is outside the limits or if the bottle has no stopper or even if there was a failure in the detection the bottle, the bottle is rejected. When finishing or suspending the production order, an email will be automatically send to two email addresses (that can be configured) with a summary and the state of the production order.

Connection to Various Accessories

SANE can also be connected to certain accessories and thus becoming an even more powerful tool. It can be connected to a barcode reader, or to an automatic rejection system that removed the bottle from the production line, or even to a temperature sensor that measures the wine temperature and allows the correction of the filling levels by resorting to a wine dilatation curve specific to the bottles being analysed.
Core Software for Information Management

Since SANE is a machine designed for quality control and supervision, it saves all the measurements in a local database and can present statistic results to simplify the analysis of the process.

This local database is in SANE’s PC and it’s responsible for the temporary storage of the production orders which can be viewed graphically. The finished production orders aren’t deleted but are no longer available for viewing. 

This limitation is solved with the Core Software for Information Management. With this software all the information is sent to a core database which allows for a more careful analysis of all the production orders. The user will have the possibility of accessing all the information saved in the database (date, filling level, stopper length, headspace) and a set of additional data associated with each bottle (production batch, product type, bottle type, etc.). 
 
By applying the desired filter, it’s automatically presented to the user the graphic of the results, the individual values of all the bottles analysed and also a set statistical data (average, standard deviation, maximum, minimum, Cp and Cpk) which simplifies the identification of tendencies, the detection of problems and the reduction of waste.

Summary

In general, the systems for filling level control available on the market only identify if the level is above or below a certain limit but they don’t measure it and much less save those values. SANE by allowing the filling level control and by measuring and recording those values is far superior to any conventional system and presents many more possibilities and options.
If you are interested in SANE or if you need any more information, don’t hesitate in contacting EGITRON: info@egitron.pt.