Agr International offers a number of products that are designed to aid bottle manufacturers achieve their most aggressive light weighting goals while maintaining the highest quality. These products, along with an array of quality management and process control for plastic containers are exhibited at NPE, booth W618.
In particular, the company's Pilot Profiler with Process Pilot automated blowmolder management system is a unique product that interfaces with the blowmolder to provide precise material thickness distribution management and defect detection for PET bottles while offering hands-off blowmolder control. With the trend towards ever lighter bottles, the Process Pilot system is an effective lightweighting tool as this system offers bottle producers the ability to aggressively light weight bottles to the absolute minimum, while providing the confidence that material is distributed appropriately.
The Process Pilot system makes it possible to produce consistent high-quality bottles on a 24/7 basis regardless of operator skills, environmental changes and preform variations. The Process Pilot system has proven to help bottle producers realize the full savings potential of their light weighting projects as a result of reduced material and energy consumption, higher overall quality and significantly improved production efficiencies.
Another product on exhibit is the Pilot Vision, Agr’s vision-based inspection system that mounts inside the blowmolder, provides detection of random occurring defects during the production of PET bottles. This system offers manufacturers a means to critically evaluate even the lightest preforms and blown bottles for defects that may compromise the quality of the finished product.
The OptiCheck™ system, a compact and extremely powerful vision system, designed to manage quality on HDPE and similar containers, features a new level of vision-based quality management for rigid plastic containers transported on a table-top conveyor. The OptiCheck system can be configured with up to 12 cameras and offers versatile yet comprehensive inspection for the entire container including seal surface, sidewall, base and label defect detection as well as laboratory-precision finish gauging. The OptiCheck system is designed to meet the needs of manufacturers that produce bottles in a wide range of shapes, sizes, materials and colors.