700180Novel Inspection Technology for Glass Container ManufacturingClosedGRD Proof of MarketInnovate UKThe company has identified an innovative non contact approach to the inspection of moulded glass containers which are produced in their millions using highly automated moulding and annealing technology. Where defects occur the industry uses additional and costly secondary inspection to further check for non conformities. Current state of art technology involves the use of a light source and optical technology to identify the flaws in the glass. The company have identified a number of concepts which would be developed to identify the defects in the moulded glass material. This could also be further adapted to inspect hot glass containers that have just been ejected from the mould. The benefit would be the cost saving in terms of 30-40 minutes of production on a line, which could easily equate to 25,000 scrap units all with similar defects because existing state of art inspection equipment is located towards the end of the production line. With intricate container design and where embossing is employed this creates additional difficulties for automated inspection. The proposed new non contact concept technology would potentially enable a more reliable inspection check to be carried out and may potentially be applied to hot glass containers or even containers that have already been filled with a product which is well beyond the capability of existing state of art inspection methods. Glass Resort believe that the solution has considerable commercial potential with the savings in waste material, waste energy and secondary inspection alone being anything upto £15M for the largest plants per annum.