The HEUFT squeezer QA leakage check

The HEUFT squeezer QA in the dairy

Hasn´t it happened to all of us at some time or another? You go shopping, empty your shopping bags at home and find that a bottle of chocolate milk has leaked onto the rest of your shopping. This negative experience can mar the image of a product. If this happens again with the same brand the customer may decide not to buy this product in the future.

Such a leak is not necessarily caused by an incorrectly packed container which has been damaged during transport. It is just as likely that a leaking closure is the reason for this. It may just seem annoying when a container leaks but the dangers are considerably greater: the product can go off and as a result its consumption could constitute a health risk.

Containers with dairy products often have inductive seals. With this type of closure foil is welded onto the container.

This procedure can be disrupted in a number of ways:  if the opening of the container is uneven there is no contact between the container and the foil during the sealing process. This gives the impression that the foil has been correctly applied but it does not touch the container at one point. The same problem arises when some of the product is left on the opening of the container during the filling process or the foil has been applied out-of-line and does not touch the opening everywhere. Whereas the latter fault is relatively easy to identify with an optical inspection machine the other two faults present a challenge even for specialized machines.

This is not a problem for the HEUFT squeezer QA. It checks the closure by means of conveyor belts which apply a precisely adjusted pressure to the container. This pressure causes the inductive seal to bulge. The squeezer measures the curvature in a squeezed and unsqueezed state. Both measurements are evaluated and compared. The results show whether the closure leaks or not. This method is so accurate that even leaks in the foil of considerably less than one tenth of a millimetre in size can be identified.

When used in conjunction with an equally efficient rejection system the HEUFT squeezer QA is a reliable way to ensure quality and at the same time protect the customer.