Do you use sight glasses to control your food or drink manufacturing processes? Reduce waste and save money with SATRON optical sensors

Do you use sight glasses or optical windows to control key interfaces in your food or drink processes? If you want to reduce waste and save money you should consider using Satron optical sensors.

Sight glasses are a key feature in many food processing industries. They allow operators to see directly into the pipe when there is a change of product or a product/water interface so that they can perform actions, like switching a valve.

Whilst simple solutions have benefits, in food and drink production, using sight glasses can be costly, especially when material and energy costs are increasing:

• Reaction times = Waste. As an example, if a process is pumping a liquid at 10 m3/hour, it means 2.8 litres pass the sight glass every second. Therefore, a 10-second reaction time, which seems small at first, will result either in a loss of 28 litres or 28 litres of the wrong liquid going to the tank with the right product.
• Operator dependence = Waste. Different people will often see the transition between two liquids at different points, and factors like different lighting at night vs daytime make judging the correct time to react to a transition even more variable. For example, to ‘stop pumping when water is visible in this liquid’ depends upon who is doing it, as the ability of the human eye to detect the mixing of one product with another varies greatly from person to person and product to product.
• Not being able to see it = Waste. The human eye cannot see transitions like a 10% addition of water to cream, which a Satron VO optical sensor can detect in real-time, and prevent product losses and quality issues.

Satron optical sensors, available from PLUS Automation, precisely detect the amount of product at every moment of the day, providing a real-time, accurate “super eye” on the process and feeding it back to the automation systems. Satron’s VO sensors are hygiene certified and adapted to a broad range of applications. They are a key tool trusted by food and drink manufacturers t0 improve and standardise processes and reduce losses, with a very short payback time.

Satron makes introducing their optical sensors into an existing manufacturing process easy with an adaptor kit to install it into an existing sight-glass. The adaptor kit helps achieve a payback time of only a few months, with an innovative sensor which is used by many leading global brands.