Seamless Quality Monitoring from Raw Material to Finished Roll

Published: February 20, 2024

ISRA VISION is a leading global supplier of automated, camera-based industrial image processing technologies. The company’s advanced inline optical inspection solutions have been used for over 35 years in a vast range of industries, including battery, plastic film, printing, and packaging where they make a key contribution to quality control and sustainability by promoting the conservation of finite resources and the continuous optimization of process chains.

SMASH – Inline Inspection Solutions for Plastic Films

ISRA VISION’s SMASH systems offer custom, application-specific solutions for the inline inspection of plastic films including blown, cast, and biaxially oriented (stretch) grades. These solutions are well suited for transparent, matt, and opaque films as well as metalized surfaces. Thanks to their combination of powerful hardware and comprehensive software tools, ISRA VISION’s inspection solutions enable 100% quality monitoring from the extruder to the finished wound and converted roll, maximizing reliability right along the value chain.

Applications range from the manufacture of films for flexible packaging, food, and pharmaceutical packaging, battery web products, release liners, and interlayers for laminated glass to optical films like prismatic or polarizer films.

The latest, high-resolution embedded and slim camera systems combined with ultra-bright smart LED lighting modules are the powerful hardware platform for ISRA VISION’s inspection solutions. Due to In-house development and manufacture these components can be optimally tailored to the customer’s requirements for the specific application, e.g., to different web widths and web speeds. Additionally, both light and dark field inspection are possible, so enabling reliable detection of typical defects such as holes, gels, fish eyes, streaking, soiling, oil spots or insects, etc.

Comprehensive User-friendly Software Suite

In addition to innovative hardware technologies, ISRA offers comprehensive software platforms as a centralized or browser-based Touch&Inspect architecture with an intuitive and customizable user interface. Proven classification tools like QuickTeach are being joined by new self-learning AI-based classifiers. These automatically segment and classify defects and surface properties but also achieve the best possible result thanks to new deep learning methods. Subsequent manual retraining of the system to boost defect detection and differentiation is straightforward. This boosts yield because optimized classification leads to disregarding defects that are insignificant for a particular application. Only relevant defects must be documented and subsequently sorted out.

In addition, ISRA’s Beyond Inspection software solutions such as RewindManager and SlitOptimization provide valuable assistance with conversion. For instance, RewindManager makes it easy to eliminate possible errors during conversion of the finished rolls by automatically stopping the slitter or doctor machine at the exact position of the defect. Comprehensive reporting functions round out the suite, enabling complete documentation of the production process and quality for the customer.

These software solutions contribute to increasing quality, yield, and output, reducing customer complaints, lowering material and energy consumption, and ensuring greater sustainability in the production of plastic films.

The company also supplies the SurfaceSTAR SIS surface inspection system and SurfaceSTAR GS gel sensor system to blown and cast film manufacturers for coating and converting systems. These pre-configured standard modules can be integrated directly into the products ex-works, while their plug-and-play functionality means they can be easily adapted to existing production environments.