In the current state of the art of quality assurance in the pharmaceutical industry, the inspection technique is based on line camera and image analysis. 100% of the production is inspected with a minimum speed of 600 containers per minute. Each container is filled with 3ml of a water-based drug product.
The ambition is to find all kinds of material in the liquid as small as is 50µm (glass, aluminum, fibres…). Detecting smaller sizes can be interesting but is not specifically required.

This highly performant technique has however 2 main drawbacks: the machine footprint and opaque products: 

• The machine foot print. At rest, the particles to be detected tend to be either at the bottom of the container or at the surface of the liquid. To make sure that all the particles are seen by the cameras, the containers are spun at 10 000 RPM. This spinning approach leads to a machine with a very large footprint (typically 6m x 2m).

• Opaque products. Even though the majority of tested products are transparent, the new approach should be capable to handle opaque products.