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Abstract: Foreign bodies in packaged foods may pose both a safety risk and a risk of perceived degradation of quality. When food products are manufactured or packaged, small foreign objects might end up in the product. It is naturally desirable for the food industry that all foreign bodies are detected and removed before they reach customers. In this study, the ultrasonic method was used to detect the foreign bodies in canned foods. In order to establish a technical concept for the detection of foreign bodies in canned foods, an experimental investigation was carried out using pulse-echo ultrasonic testing. A number of simulated foreign object pieces were deliberately put inside the canned food and the results were analyzed. The approach demonstrates that ultrasound has potential for application in many industrial food packaging environments where foreign objects need to be detected. Indeed, detection up to 4 millimeter foreign body size has been done for rock and metal foreign bodies.
Keywords: Canned food, foreign bodies, nondestructive testing, ultrasonic
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Introduction
A foreign body (FB) is defined as a piece of undesirable solid matter present in a product. The food manufacturer's objective is to supply products completely free from foreign bodies, in order to meet the consumers' expectations (Wallin and Haycock, 1998). It has been considered a serious offense for food manufacturers to carelessly fail to detect the presence of the foreign body inside their food products. The economic justification for addressing these as serious issues arises from the need to protect a brand name, whether it's the brand of the manufacturer or of the retailer. Rather than the brand being damaged by a spate of consumer complaints, the reaction is usually to recall the product that might be affected. If the foreign body and its source can be identified and traced to a source in the supply chain, the depth and breadth of the recall can be limited (Andrews et al., 2001).
Ultrasound-based measurement is a promising method for foreign body detection because it has ability to differentiate discontinuities in acoustic impedance between different regions within a given volume. Such discontinuities would represent a thing that differs from its surroundings, such as a foreign body. In addition, ultrasound is non-destructive and does not...