Development of Metallic Contaminant Detection System Using RF High-Tc SQUIDs for Food Inspection

In this study, we developed a practical magnetic metallic contaminant detector using three high-Tc RF superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) for food inspection. Finding small metallic contaminants is important for food safety. When contamination occurs, the manufacturer of the product suffers a great loss to recall the tainted products. Therefore we developed a practical food contaminant detection system based on high-Tc RF SQUIDs. The system was covered with waterproof stainless steel plates, and the outer dimensions of the system were 2450 mm (W) × 714 mm (D) × 1555 mm (H). An acceptable inspected object size was 150 mm (W) × 100 mm (H), which is sufficiently large for practical food inspection. A digital filtering technique has been newly introduced to reduce noise. As a result, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was dramatically improved, and we were able to robustly detect a steel ball as small as 0.3 mm in diameter.