Low-cost contactless monitoring of aseptic package integrity and content quality using capacitance

Abstract

Aseptic packaging is employed by food and beverage industries to maintain sterility for prolonging product shelf life without refrigeration. In a fully integrated fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) production line, high throughput non-destructive detection of visually non-obvious packaging defects like pinholes is a challenge using current inspection techniques. A non-contact capacitive electronic sensing platform based on the tuneable sensing depth under an applied sinusoidal signal is proposed for monitoring the changes in capacitance due to the effect of pinholes on the package integrity (package dimensional changes) and content quality (dielectric changes). The real-time capacitive system successfully detects pinhole formation with good detection speed (< 3 s) and low detection limit (∼54.69 μm), identifies the onset of product decay and captures subsequent package deformity using a combination of sensing topologies and location information. The demonstrated multi-phase detection proof-of-concept could translate into contactless aseptic package/product quality monitoring systems for production, storage and retail.