The primary and secondary packaging stage in pharmaceutical industries holds many scrutinies and an extra eye to detect defects. For example, one of the most crucial pharmaceutical packaging challenges is preserving the curative effects of the medicine. Moreover, they must meet existing quality control standards. Here lies the opportunity for a machine vision system to play a vital role in improving packaging processes. The machine vision system can detect the defects and reject that particular part immediately to maintain uninterrupted production. The pharma packaging industry has embraced this innovation to become more organized and uplift its brand image. With the current surge in the growth of pharma packaging, there lies a huge demand for machine vision systems.
Pharma packaging market scenario
The pharma packaging industry is exponentially rising high. During recent years, manufacturing processes have increased, and the market looks relatively stable. Investors are eyeing the more prominent prospects of the market. The companies are making various investments to meet the surging demand for pharmaceutical packaging and capture a majority of the market share in the pharmaceutical packaging sector. Along with this, expansion in the facilities by these companies can further enhance their market position in the pharmaceutical packaging sector.
The emerging need for better healthcare facilities and a rising population ratio strongly contribute to the growth in the pharmaceutical packaging industry. The key players with a considerable market share in the global pharmaceutical packaging market are spreading their wings and investing a large chunk. Machine builders are now investing in R&D and rationalizing various innovative products.
The machine vision system is one of them – B&R’s integrated machine vision system fulfilling the manufacturer’s demand and making their processes less complicated. The model has mainly been designed after understanding machine builder demands and fully integrated into the control system. The market is collaborating with the automation vendors primarily to seek a better approach and secure market position. Pharmaceutical packaging includes various parenteral containers, plastic bottles, blister packaging, closures, specialty bags, labels, etc.
Machine vision solution for packaging
Machine vision technology is the ‘eye,’ which the human eye misses noticing the defects. It results in higher efficiency and accuracy at lower costs with robust brand integrity. We know with this accuracy and efficiency, pharmaceutical guidelines are stringent compared to the packaging of other goods. Packaging of pharmaceutical products requires passing through many scrutinies. A manufacturer needs to fulfill many specifications to achieve the quality of the drugs including its labeling and packaging, which are two essential things, as it involves health adherence, QR code, ingredient details, information about usage, etc.
Packaging and labeling are two vital rudiments for any pharmaceutical company. The quality of the packaging here is outstanding as it maintains the drug quality. There is defined guideline from FDA for labeling and packaging. Here, any fault related to the printing of composition of drugs or related compliance guidelines or dosage directions requires strict verification. These are certain things that can be missed by any human naked eye and can pass through quality assurance unintended. In contrast, these faults undetected hold serious issues to many levels.
To achieve the goal of making inspection more flexible and efficient while at the same time, saving costs and precision in detecting the faults, B&R has already joined hands with many customers to bring the machine vision system into the light. The heart of B&R’s vision solution is a broad selection of intelligent camera technology. For the entire portfolio of cameras, there are easy-to-configure machine vision functions for creating applications with minimal programming. Machine vision machine is a boon to pharma packaging Industry. It has made life easy. The growing demand for pharmaceutical packaging is due to rising healthcare expenses and consumer awareness regarding healthier lifestyles. In addition, today’s innovative packaging solutions, higher patient convenience, and compliance drive the market for pharmaceutical packaging.
Machine Vision technology is termed scalable and easy to use. Automated machine vision systems were once considered highly expensive and impractical for drug packaging; this outlook has changed among manufacturers allowing them to monitor line performance, eliminate operator error. With B&R’s integrated machine vision system to market, it is exceptionally approachable and manageable for the machine builder and its developers. From the comfort of their familiar automation environment, they can access all the camera functions they need and easily integrate them into the machine application. No specialist image processing know-how is required, so introductory training is kept to a minimum.
In circumstances that require just one specific image processing function, such as reading a QR code or position detection, the Smart Sensor version of B&R’s camera is the right choice; there is no need to install extra camera hardware for each function. Instead, the user configures the desired Smart Sensor function as needed in the Automation Studio engineering environment. Manufacturers can justify installing machine vision at many locations along a packaging line, with each performing a single inspection to verify quality following each specific value-adding function. A machine vision system ensures the integrity of the product and packaging components and is one of the most critical applications today.
A machine vision system can inspect a bottle or vial for the correct size, color, shape, dimensions, and other critical properties such as curvature finish or the presence or absence of any minute contamination. The vision systems are used to verify the correct assembly of packaging components, which requires vast and accurate knowledge of the characteristics to be inspected. Monochromatic inspection can be useful when components’ colors are standardized within the system it can also be used to detect the missing closures on bottle packaging. This application is becoming increasingly important on high-speed packaging lines to detect defects at different inspection windows within a limited processing time. In blister packaging lines, seal integrity can be challenged or faults detected by the systems based on pre-established sealing patterns. This allows machine vision systems to verify the package’s protection and dispensing functions.
In the packaging industry, the packaging faults or defects unnoticed by the human eyes can be easily spotted with machine vision solutions in less than a second. B&R’s vision system gives a better choice for an inspection process. This fast and detailed infection performs 100% online inspections and offers results in improved quality, higher profits, and lower production costs; as It refers to new measures in pharma packaging, the barcode recognition will take on a new role in the quality assurance process. Equipped with these abilities, pharmaceutical manufacturers can put their machines to work to comply with strict new regulations and answer some of the questions at the end of the production line. Machine vision is beneficial on large-scale pharmaceutical production lines, where the requirements are highly scalable and focus on detailed quality inspection. There are several ways that this can take shape.
