Manufacturers who produce bags of cement in Croatia are legally required to print a production date on the side of each cement bag they produce.
To comply with these regulations, one Croatian manufacturer installed ink-jet printers from Croatia-based Info -- a distributor of Videojet industrial coding, printing and marking products -- on their packaging lines.
But because the cement manufacturing line is a very rough production environment where cement dust can fill the air, the date printing was not always successful and some bags of cement went to market without them.
To tackle the problem, engineers at Cognex (Natick, MA, USA) Automation Solution Provider (ASP) Tipteh Zagreb (Zagreb, Croatia) have deployed a Cognex In-Sight 5100 vision system with an optical character recognition (OCR) tool to verify that the codes were printed on the bags.
To monitor the results, the In-Sight system was connected to a Cognex VisionView 700 operator interface panel so that the operators could monitor the process. It was also connected to a programmable logic controller (PLC) over a Modbus interface, which compared the characters on the bags with those in its database.
The cement manufacturer can now be assured that the production date is effectively printed on each of the bags of cement that it ships.
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-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
