When it’s a matter of food inspection, the choice of the x-ray beam orientation is a crucial phase of the implementation of an x-ray inspection system in the production line.
Different orientations can affect the accuracy of scanning and detection of foreign body contaminations.
What is a X-ray Beam?
The X-ray beam consists in a wide range of energies known as the x-ray emission spectrum. The X-ray beam can have different orientations and with different orientations can affect the quality of the inspections and so, the safety of food inspected.
Top-Down Inspection
We can talk of Top-Down inspection when the X-ray beam is put over the product and the conveyor belt. The orientation of theinspection is verticalfrom the top of the product to the bottom. This type of configuration is preferred when the products to inspect are larger and wider than taller, for example, flat packages, pouches, or small bags.
The Top-Down Inspection for product that enter horizontally under the detection, provides better senisibility because through the vertical cross-section there is the least product to mesure.
Lateral Inspection
Lateral inspection, unlike top-down inspection, has an inspection geometry that is incident to the flow of products passing on the conveyor belt. The x-ray source is positioned laterally, and the beam strikes the product being inspected perpendicularly.
It is particularly suitable if the production line works with products or packages that are taller than wide, such as bottles, bags of biscuits, cans, tins, and milk cartons.
Diagonal Inspection
A further possibility offered by Xnext inspection systems is diagonal inspection.
The x-ray source is positioned to reach the product diagonally in this case.
This inspection geometry makes it possible to reach points that are difficult to inspect or even unreachable by other solutions. The possibility of running into blind spots that may hide foreign bodies that would therefore not be detected.
In addition, the source can be moved closer to have a higher magnification of the scanned products and get much more details of each product.
As you can read, Xnext, can offer many different beam orientations and we work to find the best inspection geometry for every customer’s product in order to detect all the possible foreign body inside food.
