Capacitance-based Contactless Monitoring of Aseptic Package Integrity and Content Quality

Abstract

Food and beverage industries employ aseptic packaging to maintain sterility for prolonging the shelf life of contents. Package leakage would degrade the product quality and prove fatal for the consumers. In a fully integrated fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) production line, non-destructive detection of visually non-obvious packaging defects like pinholes with high throughput is a challenge using current techniques. A capacitive non-contact electronic sensing platform is proposed for harnessing the effect of pinholes on the package (changes in dimensions) and its contents (changes in dielectric properties) under an applied AC electric field. The multi-electrode sensors pick up real-time capacitance changes from different locations (headspace, middle, and bottom) using different sensing topologies (floating ground and fringing field). The proposed inspection system successfully detects pinholes, identifies the onset of product decay and indicates spoilage. The developed proof-of-concept system could translate into contactless electronic cartons for aseptic package/product quality during production, storage and retail.