ARS | Publication request: X-ray detection of defects and contaminants in the food industry

Submitted to: Sensing and Instrumentation for Food Quality and Safety
Publication Type: Review Article
Publication Acceptance Date: June 13, 2008
Publication Date: June 25, 2008
Citation: Haff, R.P., Toyofuku, N. 2008. X-ray detection of defects and contaminants in the food industry. Sensing and Instrumentation for Food Quality and Safety. 2:262-273.

Technical Abstract: The ability of x-rays to traverse through matter and reveal hidden contaminants or defects have led to their extensive use in manufacturing industries for quality control inspection. The difficulties inherent in the detection of defects and contaminants in food products have kept the use of x-ray in that industry limited mainly to the packaged foods sector. Nevertheless, the need for non-destructive internal product inspection has motivated a considerable research effort in this field spanning many decades. Improvements in technology, especially more compact and affordable high voltage power sources, high speed computing, and high resolution detector arrays or CCD's, have made many x-ray detection problems possible today that were not possible in the past. These improvements can be expected to continue into the future. Most of the detection tasks that are still not feasible are hampered by the loss of signal to noise ratio in the images as the speed of the system increases. What is needed is a high speed system with a low energy and very high current x-ray source. Such a system should be able to accomplish many of the real time high speed detection tasks that current x-ray systems can not handle.