Equipment

The Thermo Electron Corporation is claiming it has significantly raised the standard in machines used to detect contaminants in packaged goods.

The company claims its newly developed APEX high-performance metal detector is 20 per cent more sensitive than standard machines on the market.

The device is designed for inspection systems for the food, pharmaceutical and beverage industries. It uses Thermo’s patent pending “multi-coil” technology, which increases the effect of the magnetic field in the machine’s aperture by more than 1.5 times. This enables the detector to target and amplify signals from much smaller pieces of metal. The APEX also incorporates a new shielding technique that reduces the effects from hard-to-handle, wet or conductive products.

Thermo Electron claims the combination of the above, along with new processing software, gives the detector previously unattainable levels of sensitivity.