If you’re an electrical engineer, you might not think that a 3 decibel increase or decrease in power (ratio of 2:1 or 1:2) would make much difference in a radio signal received 30 miles away from the transmitter site, and you’d be right. But, if you consider the difficulty of detecting stainless steel (SS) fragments in food less than 1.0 mm in size, being able to consistently detect a metal fragment one-half the size—or 0.5 mm—would be a major improvement, seemingly insurmountable in the real world.
ABM Equipment (Vancouver, Wash.) thought that Eagle’s PXT solution would be capable of accomplishing this if it were applied to products outside poultry. Eagle’s PXT X-ray solution, originally developed for the poultry industry where bones are becoming finer and less calcified, was designed to provide a new level of sensitivity in one of the most troublesome applications. To do this, the generators’ beam geometry was modified and the detection nodes (diodes) were placed closer together—reducing the spaces through which contaminants could slip, says ABM Co-Owner Jeff Walling. With more data to work from, the algorithms were also restructured to more accurately identify contaminants and reduce false rejects.