Glass bottle inspection for maximum security

The Margon Brunnen in the Müglitz Valley near Dresden has invested in quality control for its bottling hall two times over.
For its returnable-glass line, the mineral water bottler has installed an inline Linatronic, and the combined line for PET and glass showcased a debut for a Linatronic equipped with four cameras for a "Full Front View" in terms of side-wall inspection and concomitantly maximised detection accuracy. The returnable glass bottles, together with the catering-trade range, are predominantly filled on the smaller 30,000-bph line, which was revamped in 2004 to handle returnable glass bottles, with a Krones Solomatic labeller, a Checkmat fill-level inspection unit and not least the Linatronic 735 empty-bottle inspector. This inline machine features inspection units for base inspection, sealing-surface inspection, thread inspection, HF and IR residual-liquid inspection, side-wall inspection and a camera-based foreign-container detector in the machine’s infeed. At Margon, a new software package for detecting the familiar shell chips has also been integrated. The intelligent software looks for faults in the pearl décor area of the GDB onion-neck bottle. It has been integrated into the side-wall inspection feature with IRIS technology. The shell chip inspection feature detects flat chips, smears, iron filings burnt into the pearl décor area, mortar splashes, and label residues as faults.
"It’s simply a matter of product safety", explains Plant Manager Dr. Hoog. "We have to offer our customers the highest possible standard of safety that we can find on the market. That’s why we opted for the Krones inspector. That goes for both the technical equipment and the machine’s hygienic design. The IRIS technology with the maintenance programme stored in memory, the malfunction diagnostics programme, the 24-hour on-call service, were arguments we regarded as crucial."