Bell-Everman Case Study: ServoBelt Rotary Has the Right Moves for Bottle Inspection

Avid Corporation makes good use of ServoBelt Rotary’s large through-hole and easy installation in a unique vision inspection system for the packaging industry.

In bottle manufacturing operations, inspection is about more than just quality control. It’s also a matter of productivity since technicians can spend hours collecting bottle weight and dimensional data to ensure that molding machines and tooling are running properly. Avid Corporation has been making that quality data a lot easier to collect for more than two decades.

The company builds a variety of automated and semi-automated vision inspection systems that increase the throughput and accuracy of quality operations. Some of these systems measure bottle wall thicknesses, neck profiles and weights. Others automate the volumetric measurements that help establish and monitor optimal fill heights. Still other systems inspect the dimensional parameters and weights of pre-forms, the plastic “blanks” that are blown up into bottles.

The gain in inspection productivity associated with Avid’s systems can be dramatic. Jonathan Strater, the company’s co-founder and president, estimates that measuring the output from a modern high-cavitation preform tool can take up to five days by hand. Avid’s most highly automated systems, which feature integrated conveyors and pick-and-place capabilities, can do the job in about six hours. “Just fire it up and forget it,” says Strater.

From an accuracy standpoint, the systems also eliminate the gauging errors associated with hand measurements. Whether fully or partially automated, Avid’s vision systems typically offer accuracy and repeatability within 0.0004 inches on dimensional measurements and within 0.1 gram on weight.

Nowadays, inspection automation has something else going for it. It dovetails nicely with the packaging industry’s big push toward bottles that use less material. “Monitoring the wall thickness and profile is more crucial than ever as the packaging industry comes up with bottle designs that have to maintain their rigidity with thinner wall sections. There’s a lot less tolerance for variations in wall thickness,” Strater says.

Avid’s most recent measurement system looks at bottles in a whole new way–from the bottom.

Read the full case study here: ServoBelt Rotary Has the Right Moves for Bottle Inspection