Vial Coding and Inspection - Vial Coding
DMW Automation engineers and staff personnel were contacted by a Pharmaceutical company and their 3rd party vision system supplier to provide a vial handling platform to code unlabeled vials at speeds up to 400 parts per minute. The Coding allowed the vials to be re-inspected later and prior to further packaging and/or labeling.
Overview
- Location: Southeast, Southwest, and Europe
- Industry: Pharmaceutical
- Products/Services: Vials
- Primary SIC Code: 2834
- Annual Sales: $1 Billion+
- Automation Technology: Continuous motion
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| Vials in--feed and out-feed dials. |
Situation
DMW Automation was approached by a large pharmaceutical manufacturer when they had a serious problem handling uncoded, and therefore unidentifiable, vials. The vials were unlabeled and uncoded and were shipped in coded trays. As long as the vials stayed in place in their trays there were no inventory or identification problems.
However on at least one occasion, an accident occurred with a shipment of vials. The vials became scattered and separated from their identifying trays. The entire cargo, including all undamaged vials, had to be destroyed and written off.
Our customer wanted us to develop a system to imprint a code on each vial before final packaging.
Action
DMW Automation personnel met with the customer and the 3rd party vendor to evaluate and examine the various vial sizes, and review the requirements of the handling system.
Our engineers identified a potential solution technology, ACE-trac, which was patented, and that they believed could help solve the customer’s problem. They investigated its capabilities to handle our customer’s specific problem.
We then improved the ACE-trac technology, making it more durable and thus able to handle the rigors of pharmaceutical production requirements. Afterwards we worked with 3rd party providers to utilize their code printing and verifying technologies and married those three technologies together into one operator interface
Our solution used the precise ACE-trac handling of molded or tubular glass vials for sizes ranging from 2cc to 100cc. Because the print area is often limited and the size of the printed code is continuously increasing, it is critical that the vial handling equipment fully controls the vial position to ensure the precision and accuracy of the printing process. By controlling each vial by its neck area the ACE-trac carriers minimize the effects of glass dimensional variations. Typical print areas are on the vial crimp over-seal or the top of the vial cap.
After fabrication and assembly, we conducted Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) with the customer present and received their approval to ship the equipment. We shipped and installed the equipment on site and integrated it with the upstream and downstream production equipment.
Results
Since that time over ten vial coding and inspection platforms have been sold to this and other Pharmaceutical customers in the USA and Europe.
In doing so DMW has incorporated a variety of coding and inspection techniques, including:
- Ink-jet printing of up to seven-character Human Readable alphanumeric codes
- Ink-jet printing of up to 16x16 2D Data matrix code, both with visible and UV ink
- Laser printing of Human Readable or 2D Data Matrix codes, and
- Inspection of Lyophilized Cake presence (to reject empty vials)
DMW has worked with, and integrated, most of the major vision systems used by the Pharmaceutical industry.
These coding solutions can also be incorporated in Track and Trace applications.
For more information about DMW Automation's success stories and our custom automation equipment and systems services, please call us at 847-437-0665 or email us at sales@dmwautomation.com.
