Pharmaceutical products of the highest quality and availability are a cornerstone of modern healthcare systems. In Austria alone, the pharmaceutical industry, with 18,000 employees in 150 companies, generates an annual turnover of € 9.6 billion.
The Institute DIGITAL of JOANNEUM RESEARCH contributes with adapted sensor systems to automate complex measurement tasks in quality assurance and thus to increase production efficiency. A customer-specific inspection system is currently being implemented at a leading Austrian pharmaceutical company, in which the packaging quality of transparent materials in transparent blisters is checked.
The products are packed on an automatic MULTIVAC packaging line and checked by a JOANNEUM RESEARCH inspection system. If all checks are successful, the thermoformed packages are packed into cardboard boxes fully automatically.
"The main challenge was to exploit the individual optical properties of all components, and then design a customized inline quality inspection system, which runs for 24 hours a day", confirms DI Alfred Rinnhofer, Key Researcher for image processing and measuring systems at the Institute DIGITAL.
The project is a current example of "digitization in production" from the strategic topic area "information and production technologies" of JOANNEUM RESEARCH.