The Italian-based Industrie Polieco-MPB group is a leading compounder of polyethylene and polypropylene. With its pipe division (Polieco), it is further one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of high-density, polyethylene, corrugated pipe systems.

Within its compounding division (MPB), the company uses sorting systems for quality control to inspect and sort pellets which will be mainly used for films for food packaging. For this, Industrie Polieco-MPB relies on SIKORA’s inspection and sorting system PURITY SCANNER ADVANCED to ensure the highest material quality.

At Industrie Polieco-MPB, the PURITY SCANNER ADVANCED is used at the final step of the production process in order to inspect for impurities maleic-anhydride grafted functional polymers.

A blow film line at Industrie Polieco-MPB.

These polymers are used as adhesives and or/coupling agents and must be absolutely pure as they are further processed to products which will come in contact with food and/or drinking water.

Indeed, among other applications, the material is used as tie-layer in multilayer film structures for food packaging or as tie-layer in multilayer pipes for hot and cold drinking water installations inside buildings.

The PURITY SCANNER ADVANCED reliably detects pellets with color deviations, like light yellow or light beige pellets instead of colorless pellets, as well as small black spots on the pellet surface. These may occur because of side-reactions during the production of grafted polymers.

The PURITY SCANNER ADVANCED detects pellets for impurities before they are further processed into films for food packaging.

The PURITY SCANNER ADVANCED automatically sorts out all detected contamination starting at a size of 50 µm. Furthermore, the system provides various statistics as well as an image gallery of the detected contamination which helps Industrie Polieco-MPB to monitor and further improve its production process.

“During the development and continuous improvement of our production processes, we have been able to minimize the formation of black spots and of pellets with color deviations,” introduced Marina Ausonio, Research & Development Executive at Industrie Polieco-MPB. "However, the presence of such defects cannot be completely avoided: sorting systems like SIKORA’s PURITY SCANNER ADVANCED have the essential task to get rid of such residual defects so that we can provide our clients a superior quality material."