A novel low-cost contactless capacitive evaluation approach for capping integrity assessment of food and beverage containers

Abstract

Food and beverage (F&B) industries employ containers to package, store and transport ingredients/products. High-speed capping of containers is prone to defective sealing, which affects containment and subsequently causes leaks during transportation/handling. Currently, capping integrity assessment is performed either non-destructively inline using expensive equipment for specific container size (<20 L) and optical conditions (e.g. 3D imaging), or offline using low throughput invasive methods (e.g. leak tests). Hence, a low-cost non-destructive approach with high detection throughput for screening capping defects irrespective of container size and optical property is required. Herein, a novel container capping integrity testing strategy using a low-cost electrical approach based on capacitance of co-planar electrodes to assess differentiable capacitances for different capping defects (no cap, loose capping, tilted cap and content leak) is proposed to show the proof-of-concept. The system successfully detects no capping, loose capping, tilted capping and content leak in the capping region with good detection speed (50 ms) and low detection limits for both cap displacement (∼0.15 cm) and leak volume (∼50 µL on capping material and ∼75 µL on capping thread), respectively. Furthermore, the proof-of-concept was translated into a low-cost miniature automated decision-making system prototype to showcase the inline integration capability of the proposed system for screening defective caps.

Keywords

• Sensor
• Contactless sensing
• Capacitance
• Capping integrity
• Food quality assurance
• FMCG