Application Spotlight

Reliable Cap and Strap Detection

Producing large volumes of plastic bottle caps for consumer products at high speeds is a common application. These products include salad dressing, barbecue sauce, bottled water, ketchup and other liquid condiments, liquid antacids, liquid cough and cold remedies and a host of others. Regardless of how common the application is, these different food and medical (Rx and OTC) bottlers struggle with consistent, cost-effective and repeatable sensing solutions for cap detection. In addition, there is a similar need to detect the straps and/or buttons used to carry large bottled water or milk containers in the capping and bottling segment of the packaging industry. Balluff has an extremely dependable, repeatable solution for this kind of application with a robust, established metal-bodied 18M tubular sensor. This sensor is an off-the-shelf product with a standard M18 tubular housing that has been proven in many applications. It uses background suppression properties (BGS) to read the target and ignore objects behind it and has a wide effective operating distance of 30 to 300 mm, making mounting and setup much more flexible, but also adds to its reliability. The visible red light makes setup easy for an extremely wide variety of bottle caps with difficult properties. Benefits n Off-the-shelf product means its always in stock n Highly repeatable solution makes setup easier and less chance of false triggering n Long sensing range of 30 - 300 mm increases flexibility n Background suppression technology increases sensor reliability of differing cap colors regardless of backgrounds n Error LED makes installation easy by indicating if target is out of range Plastic Cap Detection Strap Detection

In the picture above, the background suppression sensor is setup at an angle of approximately 15 degrees from the bottle caps. With this setup, caps in a wide range of colors are reliably and repeatedly detected without the need to adjust the sensor for each cap color.

In a similar application, the same 18M tubular sensor with background suppression is setup at a 15 degree angle from the carrying strap. The strap is also reliably detected when a portion of the strap is covered by the sensors emission.

Ordercode BOS014W BCC05FJ

Part Number

Description

BOS 18M-PA-RH22-S4 PNP, NO+NC Background suppression 1 BCC M415-0000-1A003-VX44T2-050 Straight M12, 4-wire, 5 m, PVC cable 2
1 2

www.balluff-usa.com
Balluff, Inc. n 8125 Holton Drive Florence, KY 41042 n 1-800-543-8390 n www.balluff.com

PS_069 Reliable Cap Detection 2012-08