Another Food Metal Inspection ‘World First’ From Fortress

Fortress Technology has launched yet another food inspection world breakthrough – a metal detector that inspects low profile, high-value products vertically and horizontally concurrently to achieve the highest sensitivity on the planet.

The Interceptor DF (Divergent Field) is a result of the company’s longstanding expertise in metal detection and its more recent development of the two channel, two frequency Interceptor range.

“The ability to choose the direction of the inspection field is itself ground-breaking,” says Fortress European Managing Director Phil Brown. “Performance wise, nothing else on the market comes close to the Interceptor DF when looking for thin, non-spherical metal contaminants in products,” claims Phil.

Believed to be the first ever multi-orientation, multi-scan food metal detector, the Interceptor DF is especially sensitive to very thin metal contaminant flakes and foils that are difficult to detect on low profile foods, including chocolate, confectionery, nutrition bars, cookies and biscuits.

The Interceptor DF can also be used to inspect small thin packages of conductive products like cheese and deli-meats with a high value and high market image, for example steak burgers, Parma ham and Parmesan cheese.

Rather than scanning a select number of frequencies, the conveyor-style metal detector inspects raw, cooked and packaged products using multiple field directions.

To increase food safety, the Interceptor DF system addresses several previous limitations – notably orientation, size, geometry and position of metals. It’s especially reliable at detecting very thin flakes and foils that could be introduced to premium foods in the mixing, rolling, cooking, scoring, moulding, slicing or baking processes.

Innovation in action

Different to other multi-scan metal detectors on the market, the unique Fortress system uses multiple coil sets to instantaneously drive the electromagnetic fields in different directions.

Rather than missing a metal contaminant because it hasn’t aligned with a specific field, the Interceptor DF looks for signals over a broad spectrum, from multiple angles.

The stronger disturbance from one field compensates for the weaker signal from another. This increases the probability of identifying and rejecting products containing non-spherical metals by over 100%, including difficult to spot flat metal flakes.

“By taking control of something that’s inherently difficult to control – contaminant orientation – Fortress is once again proving itself to be a leader in the food safety inspection market,” states Phil.

To increase supply chain transparency and product traceability, Contact Reporter software, included as standard, produces a full log of events. These electronic records can be viewed, filtered and exported, and can be used to supplement or replace manual documentation.

For fast set up and ease of use, the Interceptor DF learns and recalls the signature of any given product with just one pass. Halo automatic testing can be added to reduce the risk of human error when manually testing the performance of the detection system.

Several North American food factories are currently trialling the new system, which is already generating a lot of positive feedback. European manufacturers will be able to see the Interceptor DF in action at IFFA 2019, Hall 11, stand 11.1.C71 (Germany, 4 to 9 May 2019) and at the PPMA Total Show 2019, stand B01 (1-3 October 2019, NEC, UK).

www.fortresstechnology.co.uk