Metal detection – challenging the challenges

With the growing demand for speed, output, productivity the pure challenge is to be able to consistently – retain & maintain quality. The production and process equipment and machines have come a long way and have boosted the production capacities 10-fold. Each and every step of production involves high speed moving metallic components and contact parts that are metallic or metal coated. Regular preventive maintenance and identifying the wearing out parts and replacing them with the original genuine parts becomes imperative for the industry.

Moving parts wear-out and if not maintained or replaced (with genuine parts) wears-out much faster - further generating a reason for wear-out of next-following process machines. Identifying these parts and replacing them in-time is a major challenge and metal detectors installed at every possible stages of process should be positively considered by the industry – as it can not only help the industry to identify and eliminated the metallic contamination but a timely intervention can save a major downtime and several inline machines.

Metal detectors should not be looked upon only as a quality control equipment for the end product. Yes!!! - each and every single product – single tablet / capsule consumed by end-user/patient has to 100 per cent inspected, not only for all the drug-related parameter but also for presence of any contamination – whether metallic or any. The industry today depends on – sampling – that really becomes only a mere “representation” of the whole batch and anything happening in-between the two samplings or in-process equipment. Validation could rather be considered as un-inspected.

 Finding the source of metal actually begins with the raw-materials arriving in the premises, which is rather a final-product for the vendor who has produced/ manufactured/ packed it. The question is who identifies it – the user presently can identify it only in the middle or end of the process only (unless there is a metal detector installed for raw-material inspection) – may be the industry considers this as an additional process, but if not then consider that the damage is already done.

Imagine the raw-material supplier has not installed and/or a properly calibrated/validated metal detector and small screw accidentally arriving inside the raw-material in your premises – this screw can be easily identified at this stage rather than allowing it to go through the whole process and equipment and in process damaging the moving-components that it comes in contact with.

The important point is to identify and remove the metal (whether small or big) right at the exit or beginning of every process and not allow it to be passed on to next process allowing more wear-n-tear and more and more metal finer shreds that further becomes more and more challenging to get identified/removed by the most-advanced metal detector – eventually affecting the productivity.

The challenge for the industry is not the speed or output, which is very well achieved by today’s most advanced production/process equipment, but the real challenge is productivity and lesser downtime for these process equipment - and this - solely depends on today’s most advanced CEIA metal detectors that lives up to these challenges and expectations of the industry by providing a complete series of highly advanced - fully-featured – high sensitivity metal detectors that gives a stable performance and ensures lesser good-product-wastages – which in itself should be considered as increased productivity.