Understanding Challenging Applications - Free PDF Download

Understanding Challenging Applications

This white paper explains that in the food and pharmaceutical industries many of the products being inspected for metal contamination exhibit a phenomenon known as ‘product effect’. This is where the type of product being inspected, can itself hinder the inspection technologies capability to identify that particular contaminant.

When looking for contaminants, it is important to note that metals are not the only materials that have the ability to conduct electricity and generate magnetic fields. Many of the foods we consume have, to a lesser extent, the same ability.

The white paper covers:

How a metal detector works
The factors that influence product effect
Differentiation of 'wet' and 'dry' products
Dealing with product effect with multi-simultaneous frequency metal detectors.

Applications producing high product effect products can be very challenging and the choice of metal detector and supplier more complex. Reading this white paper ensures that you have the latest knowledge to simplify and aid in that decision making process to maximise effect.

Please complete the form below to download this free white paper.

Traditional metal detectors trade off between the product effect, the maximum operating frequency and metal detector sensitivity. The higher the product effect (the wetter the product), the lower the optimal frequency and the lower the sensitivity of the detector. Conversely, the lower the product effect (the drier the product) is, the higher the operating frequency and detection sensitivity are. Dry products with low product effect have very little impact on the metal detector at high frequencies, so the detector can easily detect very small metal contaminants at these frequencies.

Despite the challenges of product effect, a modernly designed metal detector using the optimum technology will still perform reasonably well. The most sensitive metal detectors on the market operate at more than one frequency simultaneously and are known as Multi-Simultaneous-Frequency (MSF) detectors. They address the problem of product effect in a new and innovative manner.

The new Profile Advantage metal detector uses MSF in combinations of high and low frequencies simultaneously. Built-in product signal suppression technology, two-stage discrimination for frequency and phase cancel the information from these frequency combinations to remove the product signal. This allows for much smaller metal contaminants to be detected. The improvement in detector performance - from the traditional single-frequency metal detectors to the MSF detector - is as much as 50% in product effect or metalized film applications.