Confocal three-dimensional micro X-ray scatter imaging for non-destructive detecting foreign bodies with low density and low-Z materials in food products

Detection and prevention of foreign material in food: A review

This review highlights the critical concern foreign material contamination poses across the food processing industry and provides information on methods and implementations to minimize the hazards caused by foreign materials. A foreign material is defined as any non-food, foreign bodies that may cause illness or injury to the consumer and are not typically part of the food. Foreign materials can enter the food processing plant as part of the raw materials such as fruit pits, bones, or contaminants like stones, insects, soil, grit, or pieces of harvesting equipment. Over the past 20 years, foreign materials have been responsible for about one out of ten recalls of foods, with plastic fragments being the most common complaint. The goal of this paper is to further the understanding of the risks foreign materials are to consumers and the tools that could be used to minimize the risk of foreign objects in foods.

CONFOCAL X-RAY FLUORESCENCE ANALYSIS OF SAMPLES FORMED FROM HOMOGENEOUS LAYERS: COMPARISON OF SIMULATIONS WITH EXPERIMENTAL MEASUREMENTS

Confocal X-ray fluorescence analysis is a non-destructive method that enables the determination of the elements depth distribution in the examined sample. Accurate determination of the elements depth distributions in various samples from measured depth profiles is very demanding, and generally, a valid procedure has not been developed as yet. The main aim of this work was to design and test a universal simplified calculation procedure, which would allow the calculation of the approximate shape of the depth profiles for a sample formed from layers of a given thickness and composition. To confirm the proposed calculation method, the standard reference material NIST 1412 was used, which is formed by a homogeneous multicomponent glass containing oxides of several measurable elements. This research compares the results of the measured and calculated depth profiles in the glass reference material, where the resulting depth curves correspond almost perfectly.

An Automatic Foreign Matter Detection and Sorting System for PVC Powder

In the present study, an automatic defect detection system has been assembled and introduced for Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) powder. The average diameter for PVC powder is approximately 100 μm. The system hardware includes a powder delivery device, a sieving device, a circular platform, an image capture device, and a recycling device. A defect detection algorithm based on YOLOv4 was developed using CSPDarkNet53 as the backbone for feature extraction, spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) and path aggregation network (PAN) as the neck, and Yoloblock as the head. An auto-annotation algorithm was developed based on a digital image processing algorithm to save time in feature engineering. Several hyper-parameters have been employed to improve the efficiency of detection in the process of training YOLOv4. The Taguchi method was utilized to optimize the performance of detection, in which the mean average precision (mAP) is the response. Results show that our optimized YOLOv4 has a test mAP of 0.9385, compared to 0.8653 and 0.7999 for naïve YOLOv4 and Faster RCNN, respectively. Additionally, with the optimized YOLOv4, there is no false alarm for images without any foreign matter.

Measurement of the inner diameter of monocapillary with confocal x-ray scattering technology based on capillary x-ray optics

The inner diameter is one of most important parameters in the design and fabrication of monocapillary x-ray optics, which are widely used in x-ray technology. The confocal x-ray scattering method based on x-ray capillary optics was proposed to nondestructively measure the inner and outer diameters of the monocapillary. The positions of the boundaries of monocapillary x-ray optics were determined by a knife-edge scanning method, and the x-ray optics were profiled in two planes or in three-dimensional space accordingly. This confocal method could conveniently give the inner surface topography of the monocapillary optics, which can be used to show the difference between the actual inner surface and the theoretical one, and has potential applications in nondestructive measurements of stratified substances, or the profile morphology of a specific interface.

Confocal total reflection X-ray fluorescence technology based on an elliptical monocapillary and a parallel polycapillary X-ray optics

A total reflection X-ray fluorescence (TXRF) spectrometer based on an elliptical monocapillary X-ray lens (MXRL) and a parallel polycapillary X-ray lens (PPXRL) was designed. This TXRF instrument has micro focal spot, low divergence and high intensity of incident X-ray beam. The diameter of the focal spot of MXRL was 16.5 µm, and the divergence of the incident X-ray beam was 3.4 mrad. We applied this TXRF instrument to the micro analysis of a single-layer film containing Ni deposited on a Si substrate by metal vapor vacuum arc ion source.