Spatial Resolution Enhancement and Hardware Upgrade in XSpectra® Technology

The necessity to guarantee higher and higher quality standards in the food market, requires the real-time inspection technologies adopted on food production lines to continuously be improved, in order to be able to detect foreign bodies of even more challenging dimensions and materials. Xnext patented technology XSpectra
^®
has already successfully entered the food market sector providing breakthrough performances, but, as required by the increasing market demands, the technology is under constant enhancement. A first improvement we have implemented consists in reducing the pixel area from 0.8 × 0.8 mm
²
to 0.4 × 0.4 mm
²
, thus ensuring an higher spatial resolution. Moreover, additional improvements can be introduced by properly optimizing the operating parameters of the detector itself according to its working point. The eye of the technology is in fact a detector made of Cadmium Telluride (CdTe), a material that, as well known in literature, suffers from both polarization effects as well as time-instabilities, especially when operated at the extremely high photon fluxes required by our application. Here we report the experimental results obtained with our 0.4 mm detector prototype as well as the improvements obtained, in real operating conditions, with an hardware-optimized version of the detector.