Building Your Own Plastic Manufacturing Color Sensor Quality Lab

As Plastic Manufacturers continue on the “Yellow Brick Road” toward world class OEE performance, quality will remain an important element. Having to scrap parts or an entire production order due to poor quality is more prevalent than often reported.

A few months ago, we showed a video with a temperature sensor, real-time streaming, and alerts to notify if the readings were above a certain threshold. It can be seen here.

Color remains a vital attribute for plastics. Color matching within certain tolerances is an important quality factor, and companies can spend an enormous amount on specialty machines and labs (often at a different location which makes testing more difficult and less frequent) to perform this quality check to ensure that the products manufactured are within those color matching thresholds.

As sensors continue to abound and improve in their accuracy while also coming down in price, it will soon be very possible to build your own quality lab at a very affordable costs. While these labs will ensure that there will be less waste (i.e., bad quality detected earlier), it is this same sensor type IoT application that was shown before (Temperature Sensor Demo above) that will allow corrective (maintenance or recalibration) or adaptive adjustments (real-time adjustments to input parameters like temperature or pressure) to avoid the loss of quality cause. Microsoft, in its Azure IoT suite, will continue to build analytical, predictive, and automated services to help improve quality, performance, and availability.

Check out our color sensor demo in our previous blog, “Dynamics 365 & Azure Iot Suite – Color Sensor Demo”