The 21st Shanghai International Nonwovens Exhibition(SINCE)

BCNonwovens is an entrepreneurial family business founded in 2002 and focused on manufacturing and marketing spunlace roll goods. With headquarters in Barcelona (Spain) and a production plant in Sant Quintí de Mediona (Spain), the company aims to offer their clients optimized, high-quality solutions. The products are mainly used in the baby wipes, personal care, home care and medical care industries. Besides, BCNonwovens offers tailored solutions for technical applications.

The challenge

Highest hygiene and quality standards are mandatory in the above mentioned industries. This is why BCNonwovens opted for their first inline inspection system from ISRA VISION already in 2003, after having used a system from another manufacturer for some time. Today, the company runs three spunlace production lines, all of them equipped with inline inspection systems from ISRA VISION.

Inline surface inspection at BCNonwovens means detection of possible defects in nonwoven materials, such as thin spots and fibre accumulations, holes, as well as contamination through fibres, insects or others. If a possible defect has been identified, the roll(s) will be separated out immediately in order to ensure that the customer receives a 100% flawless product.

SMASH Benefits

• 100 % delivery of flawless material
• Detection and classification of all defects before slitting/rewinding
• Reduction of waste and raw material consumption
• Process optimization

Project data

• Max. line width: 3,400 mm
• Material thickness: 0.2 mm to 2.0 mm

High efficiency

Thanks to its advanced technology, including high-speed, high-resolution HDR color camera, high-performance lighting and AI-supported state-of-the-art classification, the ISRA VISION inline inspection system provides outstanding defect detection and classification. It is installed before slitting/rewinding and is able to detect 100% of the smallest defects at the highest production speed. Moreover, it helps to locate the origin of possible defects, thus allowing quick reaction and reject problematic raw material, clean the equipment, or optimize production parameters.

Carme Cazorla, Operations Director of BCNonwovens, comments: “The ISRA VISION inline inspection systems are very efficient and make sure that our customers receive the high quality that they expect from our products.

We can make informed decisions on the quality at each stage of the production and are able to react quickly if something is going wrong in the lines. This allows to reduce waste and raw material consumption, and thus also contributes to cost and energy savings. What is more, it increases marketable production volume and therefore our revenue.”

Ease of use

The inspection system is used by very different people within the company, e.g. machine operators, quality lab technicians, the quality management, R&D and continuous improvement departments. Thanks to its easy-to-use and browser-based interface, the system can be operated, and processes monitored from different devices, irrespective of location. The screens can be configured individually so that the users only see the parameters and information they need for their respective tasks.

As Cazorla continues: “Despite its advanced technology and numerous configuration parameters the ISRA VISION inline inspection system is very easy to operate. Thanks to the user-friendly interface and great support from ISRA VISION, it was quite easy to achieve that so many different persons can use the system on a daily basis.”

Outlook

With the launch of its latest software platform for SMASH systems, Cloud Xperience, ISRA VISION opens up new possibilities for AI-supported segmentation and classification. This innovative online solution combines the advantages of a cloud with intelligent analysis tools such as EPROMI Live. Together with BCNonwovens ISRA VISION is currently investigating how implementation of this new software platform can help improve product quality and optimize production processes even further.