Industry-Scale Application of Full-Width Digital Camera Inspection during Effective Printing on Plastic Foil at the Company "Flexograf"

Abstract

The company printing plastic sheets with eight-color machines has sought help from the Faculty of Computer Science to reduce wastage of raw materials. During the study and research in this matter, it was found that the losses in raw materials are caused by the impossibility of controlling the printing through the current adequate technology that the "Flexograf" company had at its disposal. The printing on the plastic film was supervised with a digital camera with the possibility of control at a dimension of 15 [cm]. On the other hand, the width of the printed plastic film is consistently 130[cm]. Therefore, the digital control camera for control is moved along the x-axis nine times to control the printing width of 130[cm] of the plastic film. After each displacement, the digital camera was stopped for a duration of three seconds. Wherever there was a printing defect in the part that was not monitored by the digital camera and given the printing speed of the machine for a length of 400 meters of plastic sheet per minute, it caused a significant loss of raw material if there were printing defects or lack of color. This problem has been solved by replacing the 15[cm] wide inspection digital camera with a 130[cm] wide full inspection digital camera. The effect of changing the full inspections digital camera achieved the goal and reduced the raw material losses to the minimum very close to zero.