Resulting technologies are reducing losses on food production lines, helping to ensure the safety of food and may replace glass with engineered plastics in electronic display panels. Awards are based on each achievement's technical significance, uniqueness and usefulness. Processing plants incur costs to re-sort the product and have the waste shipped away for use as animal feed. The developers of the Knife Blade Failure Detection System.
Human inspectors can take upward of an hour to catch blade failures.
However, the Knife Failure Detector, developed by Pacific Northwest and the Lamb-Weston Technical Research Center, in Richland, Wash., takes less than one second to spot part failure and trigger redirection of product flow. The detector system combines wireless power and data transmission with acoustic-based detection methods. Designed to operate in severe conditions, including constant immersion of equipment in water, the system is installed and serviced during a plant's regular maintenance cycle. This real-time process monitoring technology can be used to ensure product quality and equipment integrity in other industrial situations where measurements are difficult to obtain, such as detecting pipe leaks or monitoring rotating machinery. The Sunna Dosimeter TM accurately measures radiation doses to food and other irradiated products.