Automatic Quality Inspection and Analysis of Tobacco Packaging (I)

In the world of cigarette pack printing, Chinese cigarette pack printing can be rated as first class from design to quality. Whether the cigarette packs are overly packed or not, exquisite design, complicated processes, and strict quality requirements have brought huge challenges to the printing factory. As the materials used are getting more and more high-end, the proportion of materials in the entire printing production is increasing. To reduce the generation of waste products and improve the quality control ability, it becomes an important issue for cigarette pack printing plants.

From the perspective of the external environment, due to the excess production capacity, the current market competition for cigarette pack printing has become increasingly fierce. Tobacco companies increasingly restrict the delivery cycle, and at the same time, the pursuit of quality is getting higher and higher. Not only do they demand high quality and they expect quality to be expected. They are also more concerned with the quality control measures of the printing plants while pursuing quality. These ever-increasing demands for quality control have led to higher and higher quality management costs for printing plants and have reduced the profitability of printing plants. Facing the challenges faced by cigarette pack printing plants, AvT, headquartered in Israel, successfully developed a complete set of automatic print inspection solutions and successfully implemented it in more than 900 customers around the world. The automatic printing inspection program can help the printing factory to meet its customers' strict quality control requirements, effectively reduce the cost and reject rate, improve customer satisfaction, and eliminate returns caused by quality factors. Many cigarette pack printing plants in North America, Europe and Asia have AvT systems in operation. Automatic detection can be used for a variety of different cigarette packages, such as hard-shell cigarette packs, paper soft packs, and even filter prints.

Process Control and Quality Assurance in Printing Due to the high quality requirements of tobacco companies, once quality problems arise, large returns will result. In order to reduce the risk, most printing companies adopt the method of manual inspection of cigarette packs. However, manual inspection has its limitations, and it does not say that people have the problem of visual fatigue. It is only a very short time to detect various problems that may occur in printing. This is a very difficult task. . Therefore, to truly ensure quality and achieve zero defects, it is essential to adopt automatic quality inspection of printed products. 100% print quality assurance is not yet the full objective of automatic print quality inspection. Even if all the printing defects have been detected, waste has been generated at this time and waste has been caused. The cost reduction of the printing plant has not really played a role. Therefore, the important goal of automatic printing inspection is to reduce or avoid the production of waste products and reduce the scrap rate. Of course, 100% of the generated waste products must be detected.

What are the main problems in cigarette pack printing? Figure 1 is a statistical analysis of the problems encountered in printing and the proportion of them. Through the analysis of these problems, it can be found that the problems in printing, such as color, registration, knife line and barcode, etc., accounted for more than 92% of the printing. These problems are also gradual, cumulative, and amplified. We call these progressively accumulated problems the process issues in printing. Problems that randomly arise in printing, such as dirty spots, flying ink, etc., are called random problems. Once process problems begin to occur, if they are not taken promptly, especially in gravure printing systems with high speed, it will accumulate quickly until a large amount of waste products are produced. However, if it is possible for the human eye to be able to distinguish these problems, by monitoring, analyzing, and judging the printing automatic control equipment, and giving an alarm in time, the operator can take timely measures, and the process problem may completely be eliminated before becoming waste. For random problems in printing, it is not necessary to take measures, but there must be means to check it out to avoid the outflow of waste products.

(to be continued)