FEATURE Machine Vision
In-line CT scanning solution ensures
production quality Peter Davis, CT Automation Manager, and Jake Rickter, Automation Specialist, both at Pinnacle X-Ray Solutions, explain how inspection and evaluation of individual parts can be performed in seconds
T
he benefi ts of automation in manufacturing may appear self-evident, with speed and the avoidance of human error being
high on the list. Yet, automation can also bring challenges to quality. Legacy visual, manual/physical or periodic/batch sampling methodologies are of limited use with today’s high-speed production lines and can result in a signifi cant proportion of discarded parts. The issue is not the low cost of an individual part; it’s the potential coupling of a defective part with another one, or late detection of a problem that results in the manufacture of hundreds or thousands of bad ones. Even worse is a jammed high-speed machine, leading to a complete line shutdown. Companies that make connectors, for example, want to assure their customers that the product they are delivering by the thousands is completely free from defect. This seems to imply that 100% of those connectors have been inspected, something that in reality is diffi cult if not impossible to achieve. In-line inspection of every single part with a high-speed computed tomography (CT) system can help, when coupled with powerful scan-data analysis software. A signifi cant driver for the adoption of in-line scanning has been the leap in data processing speeds; set up on the factory fl oor at the point where just-manufactured parts emerge, such a system can scan, analyse and accept or reject a part in as short a tact time as fi ve seconds.
34 September 2021 | Automation
Implementation example An electronics-connector manufacturer was looking for an automated solution to eff ectively carry out inspection on 100% of its products directly on the production line. The part in question consisted of a small baseplate on which a large number of metal pins were mounted, then over-moulded with plastic. Its previous setup could not detect if a metal pin was deformed or out of position, before going to the insertion machine.
In-line CT system was then used, tailored to the exact speed and effi ciency metrics of the connector manufacturer’s automated production process. Located where the fi nished parts emerge on a conveyor belt, the system from Pinnacle X-Ray Solutions rapidly CT scans each part to provide both surface and internal X-ray views of the complete part volume. The data is then transferred (as an STL fi le) to a nearby computer, loaded with Volume Graphics VGInline analysis software. The software (pre-confi gured with the manufacturer’s macros and parameters) compares the geometry of each connector against a “golden mesh” – an adaptation from the original CAD design of the part that takes into account the realities of the pin-manufacturing process – to identify any variances in connector-pin structure or alignment. If a single pin is found to be outside the pre-determined tolerance limits, the entire connector is rejected by the software and automatically gated off the assembly line.
Customising the CT scanning process for an individual production line in this way requires answers to questions such as: how quickly is the line moving and how fast does the scan need to be done? What kind of information needs to be taken from the scan and what will be done with the information afterwards? What are the tolerances within the parts being produced and how much variance is permissible? Tailoring the system to the connector manufacturer’s answers produced an optimised solution that confi gured the setup precisely. The ability of CT scanning to non-
destructively “see” deep inside objects allows this kind of system to be used for quality control on manufacturing lines across many industries. The setup can evaluate parts made from almost any material, no matter how complex in shape. The software can also apply fi nite element analysis (FEA) to evaluate to what extent any variations in part geometry will aff ect performance. As the automation of factories continues to expand, the economics of implementing reliable, repeatable, quality control directly on the manufacturing line in this way are increasingly making sense to high-volume parts-production companies.
CONTACT:
Pinnacle X-Ray Solutions
pxsinc.com
automationmagazine.co.uk
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