Headlining new technologies developed for packaging processing applications at the show include a range of products designed to detect the packaging that many sensors find difficult or impossible to ‘see’ reliably.

The SICK TranspaTect photoelectric distance sensor, for example, achieves what the company believes to be the most advanced detection to date of clear materials and films and is particularly suited to transparent and semi-transparent trays and bottles. The SICK TranspaTect’s high optical performance and detection accuracy promise improved production efficiencies in processes such as picking, placing, labelling and printing.

Matt-black – one of the difficult packaging colours – is no problem for the new SICK W2S family of sub-miniature photoelectric positioning sensors.  The W2S enables high-speed conveying lines to integrate modern sensing power cost-effectively, even with the most challenging of packaging designs, including jet black, brightly coloured, matt, and transparent of highly reflective objectives.  

Pharmaceutical, Food, FMCG and cosmetics packaging all need human readable on-pack data, such as batch, lot numbers and best-before expiry dates. These numbers, letters, symbols and codes need to be verified, be of a readable quality and match the barcode to ensure the right data is associated with the right pack.   With the launch of a the  SICK Lector 620 OCR scanner Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Verification, 2D and barcode reading are combined in a single device to provide excellent reading capability for quality validation and traceability.  Stand A18.