Microwave Fill Level Inspection System for Industrial Packaged Products

Fill level control is one of the strict checks required when inspecting industrially packaged products. The purpose is both to ensure the content conformity according to the declared label information and to preserve the reliability of brand trust, strongly influenced by the customer’s evenness perception of the marketed items. To this aim, choosing the right technology is not an easy task: content and packaging material properties are essential to establish the suitability of a product to the fill level machine type. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, based on microwaves, to address this issue. The designed microwave inspection system consists of two Vivaldi antennas working between 1 and 18 GHz. We show its applicability to water, oil and alcohol-based products moving on conveyor belts at production speed. The performed experiments demonstrate good accuracy and efficiency of level classification and fault rejection in real-time processing.