Xpar Vision celebrated its 10th glasstec anniversary at the recent Düsseldorf event.

In the past 20 years, Xpar Vision has developed from a newcomer with a single product (Infrared camera system) for just the container glass industry into a mature company with a portfolio of sensors and robotics for the container glass and tableware sectors.

Xpar Vision has an installed base of more than 600 production lines today with a focus on the hot end inspection and process monitoring, process improvement, quality control and closed loop automation.

It focuses on the development of hot end sensors and robotics. Half of its 30+ staff is a dedicated developer.

Each day these work on improving existing solutions and developing new ones, using their backgrounds in Applied Physics, Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science.

“Our motto is “HEading for Perfection”, says CEO Paul Schreuders.

“All our staff, without exception, is simply living that, day by day. Our customers say that we have the best support organisation in the industry. That is a compliment. No need to say that I am very proud and extremely happy with our team and all its members”.

The complete product portfolio was promoted at glasstec 2018, including the revolutionary BlankRobot.

The BlankRobot is designed not only for swabbing, but for other applications as well. For blank mould swabbing, Xpar Vision has entered into an exclusive co-operation with LubriGlass Germany.

By applying a special LubriGlass lubricant extremely precisely, the swabbing frequency is reduced to one time per three hours only. With the BlankRobot the use of lubricant is reduced from 100% by manual swabbing to only 2%.

Most importantly there is limited disturbance of the glass forming process: as a result of which the hot end sensors will see other process disturbances much better, such as changing glass conditioning, mould wear and ambient temperature.

This improvement of measurements will lead to effective feedback loops and logically has huge impact on the effectiveness of forming process automation.

“It is our aim to create a new world for container glass and tableware producers, says Mr Schreuders.

“It is in our genes to always aim for that next step, for things that do next exist yet. We strongly believe that with our new technologies we can make glass products lighter and stronger, allowing them to be produced with (almost) zero defects at higher speed and with minimum human dependency.

"That is our mission and that is what we are working on, all together, with a lot of enthusiasm”.

Pictured: The BlankRobot in operation