A glass vial is an important primary packaging component for pharmaceutical drugs. Many biotechnologically manufactured medications, highly viscous or low-dosage drug formulations, and a series of oncologic and ophthalmologic medications make high demands of primary packaging like vails. They should be free of defects and contamination in any stage of the production, fill or finish lines. The container integrity must meet challenging specifications. To ensure all defects on glass vials can be detected, vial production facilities as well as fill and finish lines are increasingly utilizing machine vision.
Machine vision advantages for pharmaceutical packaging
Vision inspection systems for pharmaceutical glass vials can detect dimensional or cosmetic defects. It can also help control the tight tolerances on vial geometry to ensure premium quality. 100% vision inspection can detect “visible” defects even when very small. The high-end Vision systems can detect even invisible defects like missing pieces of material, deformations and contamination. These defects can even be embedded in the material.
High speed, 100% vision inspection can detect defects even when less visible and 100 um or smaller in size. High-end systems available can even detect invisible defects that are embedded in product itself or too small to see with the human eye.
Increasing yield of fill and finish
Top-of-the-range pharmaceutical packaging containers are 100% vision inspected. This inspection improves the yield of the fill and finish process drastically. Vials with defects such as glass particles, cracks, airlines, scratches, dirt and inclusions can be rejected before more value is added to them.
Diameter and height of the total vial or parts like the body, brim, neck or lip can be measured ensure dimensional and quality physical and chemical compliance to specifications. The Lyo bottom forming and blowback geometry are controlled in a based on statistical randomize sampling, or better, with 100% vision inspection.
