Quality Automation – Success Story – Hochpräzise automatische Laserabtastung von Kernringen– Anlage

Success Story

High-pre­ci­sion auto­mat­ic laser scan­ning of core rings

Connection of a MATLAB script to Beckhoff TwinCAT 3 allows complex analysis of large amounts of data.

Improve­ment of qual­i­ty assur­ance through new, auto­mat­ed mea­sur­ing system

The core ring is a com­po­nent in the man­u­fac­ture of a car tire, the incor­rect dimen­sion and out-of-round­ness affect the dura­bil­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty of the tire and can lead to high­er and irreg­u­lar wear. The device pre­vi­ous­ly used by our cus­tomer was not able to reli­ably record the geom­e­try of the core ring. The aim of the project was there­fore the new devel­op­ment of an auto­mat­ed mea­sur­ing sys­tem, which can record and ana­lyze all rel­e­vant data of the core ring and can be used for dif­fer­ent core ring diam­e­ters. The record­ed data and results should be for­ward­ed to a high­er-lev­el soft­ware for con­sis­tent qual­i­ty assurance.

Mechan­i­cal and pro­gram­ming challenges

A com­plete­ly new con­cept was ini­tial­ly devel­oped for the mea­sur­ing machine. The bal­ance-free stor­age and even move­ment of the core ring through a rotat­ing plate and the simul­ta­ne­ous pre­cise scan­ning of the geom­e­try posed a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge. To be able to mea­sure the core ring com­plete­ly in one pass, the mea­sur­ing machine must move the core ring com­plete­ly past the sen­sors. Dur­ing the rota­tion, the inner and out­er radius and the height, cou­pled to the cur­rent angu­lar posi­tion of the turntable, are record­ed using high-pre­ci­sion laser tri­an­gu­la­tion sen­sors and shad­ing sen­sors. This results in thou­sands of mea­sured val­uesin a few sec­onds, the analy­sis of which turned out to be too com­plex and com­pu­ta­tion­al­ly inten­sive for a PLC soft­ware due to the amount of data and the com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal iter­a­tion process.

High-pre­ci­sion mechan­i­cal pro­duc­tion and MAT­LAB integration

Our part­ner com­pa­ny Hille Engi­neer­ing GmbH was entrust­ed with the mechan­i­cal ques­tion and devel­oped a solu­tion that enables a uni­form rota­tion of the bal­anced rotat­ing plate and thus the core ring. Qual­i­ty Automa­tion GmbH took over the elec­tri­cal design, elec­tri­cal instal­la­tion and soft­ware devel­op­ment of the sys­tem. A Beck­hoff dri­ve con­sist­ing of a ser­vo motor and gear was used to dri­ve the turntable. The con­trol was imple­ment­ed on a Beck­hoff IPC with Beck­hoff Twin­CAT 3. A MicroEp­silon laser microm­e­ter for mea­sur­ing the height and two laser dis­place­ment sen­sors for record­ing the inner and out­er radius were used to scan the core ring with an accu­ra­cy of 10 μm. The record­ed data points are linked to the posi­tion data in the con­troller and saved as a CSV file. A MAT­LAB script was devel­oped in par­al­lel to the actu­al sys­tem con­trol, which is start­ed in the process by the con­trol. The script reads in the export­ed data and takes over the com­plex cal­cu­la­tions of the min­i­mum, medi­um and max­i­mum radius, the opti­cal diam­e­ter, the cir­cum­fer­ence, the round­ness and defor­ma­tion. The results are stored in var­i­ous files and read in by the Beck­hoff con­trol. The results are clear­ly dis­played to the oper­a­tor as val­ue­sand as graph­ics on the pan­el surface.

Mea­sur­ing sys­tem with con­nec­tion to qual­i­ty man­age­ment software

The devel­oped mea­sur­ing sys­tem for­wards the data and results via OPC UA to the high­er-lev­el qual­i­ty man­age­ment soft­ware QDA. By mak­ing slight changes to the design and soft­ware, the sys­tem can also be used to mea­sure con­cen­tric­i­ty or runout, for exam­ple of shafts, spin­dles and many oth­er com­po­nents from the auto­mo­tive, mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing or med­ical tech­nol­o­gy sectors.

Contact Person
Guido Müller
Guido Müller
Software Development
Specializations: High-level language programming, Databases
Partner

Hille Engineering GmbH & Co. KG

Vennstraße 4
52159 Roetgen
Germany

Website: www.hille-online.com

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