Fast and flexible inspection of injection pen cartridges

Injection pen manufacturers require advanced inspection systems to safeguard both their products and patients, while complying with strict safety standards and regulatory requirements.

However, injection pen cartridges are fragile, and the multiple handling steps during production increase the risk of chips and cracks in the glass.

Detecting defects early in the process is crucial, as a broken cartridge in the filling machine, for example, can lead to costly and lengthy production downtime.

Today, the inspection task is often performed as a final quality control with advanced and expensive inspection systems that lift and rotate the cartridges, but this approach misses the opportunity to catch defects early.

However, the challenge with inline inspection is that the vision system must be adaptable and compact to fit into the existing production line, and the cartridges need to be inspected from the edge at the open end. Detecting very small chips and cracks in glass by inspecting from the edge is a difficult task, partly because the defects must be identified among various elements that interfere with the image but are not defects, such as silicone residues.

The task can only be solved with AI, and JLI vision has developed a validated AI-based vision system that can detect chips and cracks with +99% accuracy.

Benefits of the chips and cracks inspection system:

• Defects can be caught early since quality  control can be placed in multiple places on the production line.
• Small footprint enables installation on existing production lines.
• Validated AI-based vision system.