ABSTRACT
Packaging is an essential part of the food distribution system in a modern society. Very few food products can be harvested, handled, manufactured, distributed, or sold without being packaged at some time. This chapter describes and discusses several of the types of sensing equipment used on packaging lines to monitor and evaluate various characteristics of packages and packaging machines. The discussion addresses factors that make automatic control and evaluation a necessity and factors that affect the effectiveness of the sensors. The chapter also discusses the use of computerized control units to interpret the information provided by the sensor units and manage operation of the line. Depending on the source of the metal contamination, a food package may contain copper, aluminum, lead, iron, steel, or stainless steel. Machine vision systems are available to perform several inspection and verification functions. Modern packaging machines use sensors to feed information to computerized controllers, which issue instructions to various parts of the machine.
