high speed leak testing of plastic vials for medical industry

TQC have recently developed a high speed, indexing rotary table based, leak test machine for handling and testing medical vials at 70 per minute. The system incorporates Nolek S9 leak test instruments, 10 banks of test modules and 2 display panels, these allow the plastic parts to be tested 10 at a time.

The machine is fully automatic and utilises step feeders for accepting bulk, random product from a stillage, these two feeders transfer parts to an infeed mechanism to orientate and feed the parts in a 5 x 2 matrix.

The indexing table has 4 positions, one for loading the parts, one for testing, one for unloading and a final empty station.

The unload system incorporates dedicated tooling to allow the parts to be placed into pass, gross leak fail or fine leak fail bins. A fail safe system is included to ensure that there is no cross contamination of pass and fail parts.

The system is PLC controlled and interfaces to a PC for data logging.

Nolek S9 Leak Test Instrument

The S9 has taken air leak test technology to the limit by combining the most sensitive pressure differential leak test valving with the most advanced front-end interface available.

The S9 has an architecture that enables up to five functional valve modules to be connected to a single front-end interface, allowing simultaneous testing of five volumes. Each module has an electronic pressure regulator for setting the test pressure automatically from the Instrument.