21 May 1998: A division of BWI Plc, the US company BWI Inex Vision Systems, located in Clearwater, Florida, USA, recently announced that one of its R&D engineers, Jim Bone, was granted a patent for a …
21 May 1998: A division of BWI Plc, the US company BWI Inex Vision Systems, located in Clearwater, Florida, USA, recently announced that one of its R&D engineers, Jim Bone, was granted a patent for a new inspection process. The patent describes the new method for measuring push-up in a bottle. Push-up is the distance that the base curves upward into a bottle. The idea was conceived when one of the company“s customers needed to measure push-up accurately, and after exhausting several technological methods, Mr. Bone came up with the solution, a system called Prolaser. “The problem is that the push-up is located underneath the bottle, making traditional measurement techniques ineffective,” said Mr. Bone. “Moreover, this is the only part of the bottle that is not coated during the glass production process, making it highly susceptible to damage.” To overcome these obstacles, Mr. Bone invented a way to measure the capacitance of the air gap under the bottle. As the capacitance changes, the amount of push-up can be inferred. However, since atmospheric conditions can change rapidly, the process also had to include sophisticated compensation circuitry. “It was tricky, but in the end we were able to create a dynamic sensing system,” Bone said. Prolaser is a non-contact dimensional gauging system for the automatic inspection of glass and plastic containers. According to BWI, it provides absolute measurement of minimum, maximum, and variation of external container profiles. Using safe, low-power laser imaging, Prolaser measures such container characteristics as height, lean, tilt, out-of-round, weight, and overall dimension. The company manufactures vision, inspection, and process control systems for glass and plastic container manufacturers, as well as for food, beverage, and pharmaceutical companies, and other producers of consumer goods.