Quality assurance for sustainability

Especially in the production of flexible packaging, quality assurance systems minimize material and energy consumption as well as waste. The systems are easy and safe to operate. They shorten the setup processes and guarantee a constant level of quality in production. And they can be integrated across processes with upstream and downstream production steps in the sense of Industry 4.0. In the process, manufacturers from different sectors enable the exchange of process data between their machines and solutions. This integration opens up additional, previously unknown options for efficiency increases in web-processing industries - and thus for more sustainability.

Legislative decisions drive the upheaval

Greater sustainability of industrial production processes has been one of the central topics at virtually all trade fairs and congresses in the recent past. Manufacturers of films and flexible packaging in particular have come under enormous pressure to drastically increase the environmental compatibility of their products. Packaging should be 100% recyclable, recyclable or biodegradable. Pressure is also coming from the branded goods industry. It is demanding that flexible packaging manufacturers deliver novel solutions that are 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025.

New requirements for quality assurance

Since the new materials, including recyclates, have special properties, they place new demands on quality assurance, for example in terms of web guiding or surface and print image inspection. BST eltromat, the supplier of quality assurance systems for web processing industries, meets these requirements with adapted web guiding systems, sensors and inspection systems, among other things. For example, in the production of new types of packaging materials, it may be necessary to gain experience and process know-how in order to adapt the coatings of the web guiding rollers.

Another example is the Digimarc barcodes, which are increasingly being used in packaging production. In contrast to the previous one and two-dimensional barcodes, the Digimarcs are components of the packaging design and therefore not readily visible to the human eye. As a rule, they are integrated into the artwork of packaging in many places. Digimarcs can be read from virtually any angle and at the highest machine speeds. They also make it possible to automatically eject plastic packaging in sorting systems of recycling companies and to feed it into the recycling process. BST eltromat offers the solutions iPQ-View for digital web inspection and iPQCheck for 100% inspection for this purpose.

Artificial intelligence in defect classification

In mid-November 2019, BST eltromat participated in the fourth meeting of the Converting 4.0 network. Here, too, the topic was data communication beyond process boundaries. BST eltromat showed how the merging of quality data brings higher efficiency and safety as well as more convenience and sustainability - as long as the information is prepared in a synchronized manner. For example, artificial intelligence in process analyses can bring great benefits in defect classification. Scenarios are currently being developed in the Converting 4.0 network as to how the consideration of further process and material data can bring additional added value.

As part of its cooperation with SeeOne Vision Technology, a manufacturer of surface inspection systems based in Florence, Italy, BST eltromat also links information from film extrusion with quality data from the printing process. SeeOne's systems detect surface defects in various materials such as films, metallized foils, paper or cardboard and use artificial intelligence to classify them as holes or inclusions, insects or dirt, for example. The findings from the surface inspection can be used for optimization in production processes in various ways.