PETpla.net Insider 12 / 2015

INSPECTION 18 PET planet insider Vol. 16 No. 12/15 www.petpla.net Detecting hole and leakage Jack Hughes, Marketing Coordinator, in the background a NexGen Rotary with 10 leak tester stations by Waldemar Schmitke February 26, 2015 We met: Jack Hughes, Marketing Coordinator On this afternoon’s agenda we have a visit to Alps Leak Testing Equipment in Mil- waukee, WI. Here we meet Marketing Coordinator Jack Hughes. Established in 1974 Air Logic Power Systems, Alps, the company designs and builds test systems for non-destructive leak inspec- tion of plastic containers. Since 2000 Alps has been part of the international Tasi Group in Ohio, whose port- folio includes test, measure- ment, inspection and assem- bly solutions. The headquarters of Alps is here in Milwaukee where it has 45 employ- ees. There are two more subsidiary companies in Ireland and Italy. North America is serviced from the head- quarters which has its own manu- facturing facility, sales and service. According to Jack Hughes, manufac- turing is highly vertically integrated and includes wiring of control panels and development of software in Mil- waukee. Jack Hughes explains: “The core technology of the equipment is use of a pressure decay test method for 100% inspection of empty plastic containers. After the containers are sealed and pressurised, a drop in pressure in the containers is precisely measured to detect the presence of leakage. In addition to detection of holes or leaks in the body of the container, the systems will detect a variety of sealing-related defects. Bad containers are automatically ejected from the production line.” The leak detector range con- sists of a wide variety of products, which are specified depending on the requirements for speed, sensitivity, range of container sizes, and con- tainer handling. The two major cat- egories are rotary and linear systems, describing the motion of containers as they travel through the machine. The leak detector systems are incorpo- rated into plastic container production lines by means of conveyors. Systems are typically installed directly downstream of the blow moulding machine (ISBM, IBM, SBM, EBM). Rotary machines use a timing screw and infeed starwheel to trans- port the incoming plastic containers Linear systems Line No. Leak testing tations Speed in bpm Typical container sizes Speed-Glider 2 up to 8 20 up to 500bpm 50ml to 10l SC Linear 1 10 up to 150bpm 50ml to 4l SC-XL Linear 1 10 up to 50bpm up to 30l RS Linear 1 10 up to 150bpm 3ml to 2l SX Linear 1 10 up to 30bpm 20ml to 6l LC Linear 1 2 up to 20bpm 100ml to 30l Rotary systems Line No. Leak testing tations Speed in bpm Typical container sizes NexGen Rotary 4 up to 30 50 up to 1200 100ml to 10l NexGen Rotary XLS 6 up to 16 up to 60bpm up to 20l onto a turntable for the inspection. After the test the containers are trans- ported back onto the conveyor via an exit starwheel, any bad containers are ejected. In the case of Linear sys- tems, standard product lines offer sev- eral varieties of container handling, including continuous motion timing screws (Speed-Glider), test heads that automatically follow the bottles on a conveyor (RS), separate indexing conveyor systems (SC), or units that position bottles using cylinders (SX).