applications: QA
to get the right retail shelf space and have a loyal customer and they pick up a mangled label, then they might buy the product on the shelf next to it,’ McLean continues. ‘You’ve then lost your customer and lost brand loyalty. The marketing angle of it from a manufacturer is really important for brand image and they’re stressing it more than ever.’
Automotive part inspection Moving from food to automotive, quality checks remain a critical aspect for any supplier providing parts for vehicle manufacture. Bead Industries, which produces electronic pins, connectors and interconnects, is one such supplier and plant manager, Kevin Mayer, comments on the importance of thorough QA inspections put in place for its True Grip pin, used in actuator control systems in vehicle air conditioning units: ‘As it’s an automotive application, every part shipped needed to meet the specifications. We couldn’t have any rejections, because any parts out of spec can result in very costly machine downtime.’ The True Grip interconnect pins are manufactured on high-speed presses, tip-to-tail. They are then traverse wound onto a reel with
interleave foam between each layer. Around 25,000 to 50,000 pins comprise each reel, with the electronic manufacturer producing the actuator control units requiring around 60 million pins per year. The inspection process involves measuring
the overall length of pins, the contact length, the collar diameter, and the collar thickness.
‘The other advantage of the vision system is that production trends can be analysed’
There are three vision systems currently running on the production line, which use Dalsa’s VA61 vision controller interfaces, Genie cameras and Sherlock software. ‘We believe that each pin is manufactured
correctly, but we couldn’t guarantee that before installing Dalsa’s vision system,’ says Mayer. ‘We have a lot of confidence in our process and we haven’t had many problems, but due to the features of this pin and the customer’s requirements it was a necessary step we needed
to take. There are 50,000 parts on a reel, around a million parts per shipment; if the customer receives one bad part they can reject the entire shipment,’ Mayer continues. ‘That was a risk we weren’t willing to take. We didn’t want that liability, so we decided to install a 100 per cent inspection.’ The presses produce up to 350 parts per
minute, so the requirement was for a high-speed vision system. Also, these pins are manufactured tip-to-tail; they are not individual pins, so that limited the inspection method to machine vision. The other advantage of the vision system is
that production trends can be analysed. Bead is able to predict tool life and proactively schedule tool changes and other preventive maintenance, which is an important part of quality assurance – i.e. not only making sure defects are detected, but also to improve the process so that the defects don’t occur in the first place. Earl Yardley, director of Industrial Vision
Systems (IVS), a UK subsidiary of German software company NeuroCheck and which has installed vision systems for a number of automotive applications, comments on the reasoning behind installing machine vision: ‘A
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