Answer to Question #992 Submitted to "Ask the Experts"

Q

I am looking for an automated transportation indexing (TI) station for shipping corrugated shipping containers. This would be hands-off as much as possible. A dream system would be a TI station measuring all surfaces and communicating to a Print and Apply labeling system which applies the label to the shipper.

A

Such systems may be used by radiopharmaceutical manufacturing companies, but they are probably assembled in-house. We are not aware of a system like this being offered commercially. Several commercial vendors, such as Canberra, have large systems which do exterior analysis of radioactive waste drums in automatic or semi-automatic setups. They might have available a smaller, less-sophisticated system or might consider putting one together for a client. Other sources in the nuclear field may be survey instrument manufacturing companies, such as Eberline, Berkeley Nucleonics, St. Gobain, etc. You can get contact points for some of these vendors on our Web site. A third alternative would be to contract with a good electronics technician and/or mechanical engineer with practical experience in coupling electronics for a custom-built conveyor belt/label application setup. These type of electronic measurement and mechanical operations are common in many industries. Almost any large-scale manufacturing operation which produces many small, relatively uncomplicated, units (canned food, cans of paint, lamp shades, lawn chairs, etc.) also employs a preliminary measurement system before the product is packaged and labeled. Such operations are analogous to this type of radiation measurement system. Of course, questions of troubleshooting, repair, and modifications to the system are factors that have to be considered with any of these options. Fred Ferate, CHP, and John Jacobus, M.S., CHP