Xing-Fei He is senior product manager at DALSA Corp.
Flawless brake operation is so essential to the safety of a vehicle that all brake systems have passed some type of safety testing before a driver ever gets behind the wheel. But how much better would you, as a driver, feel knowing that the raw brake discs of your motorcycle or minivan were inspected for any flaws even before brake assembly began? And from a manufacturing perspective, what if such an inspection yielded better quality while boosting profitability?
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A custom-designed machine vision inspection system from Ibea GmbH, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, uses cameras from DALSA to provide these benefits and more for automotive suppliers, manufacturers, and customers alike.
Putting the brakes on faulty parts
Manufacturers tend to rely on manual inspections to detect nonconformities on raw brake discs. Frequent shift changes and the subjective nature of these inspections lead to lower reliability and, subsequently, to increased manufacturing costs resulting from returns.
As a result, Ibea, which has developed, produced, and integrated industrial processing systems since 1991, recently introduced an automated system that integrates the inspection and handling of brake discs. By replacing manual inspection methods and integrating production-line components and machinery, the automated Ibea system provides automotive industry manufacturers with a comprehensive overview of the entire brake manufacturing process, and with a documented and reproducible method of ensuring brake disc quality.
An easy-to-use and economical system
The Ibea inspection system is built around a simple centering device for well-defined rotation of brake discs with diameters up to 50 cm and heights up to 15 cm. As each disc rolls along a conveyor, it is transported into the test cell via a front-end entry pulsing device and, upon triggering a sensor, stops at the centering device. The disc is precentered by three rollers, one of which is driven, for exact centering. The disc then rotates 360°, during which time three Spyder2 line-scan cameras with CameraLink high-speed serial interfaces take images of the upper, lower, and cooling channel sides of each disc. The cameras are compact, high-speed, and cost-effective line-scan devices that are easy to program and operate.
“I like to use DALSA cameras because of the vast selection of cameras, good quality, and reasonable prices,” says Akram El Jarad, project manager at Ibea. Ibea had worked with DALSA previously to design customized systems for the metal sheet, abrasive paper, ceramics, and other industries.
On the brake disc inspection system, the images taken are arranged in such a way that all defects can be found using only one image acquisition and a dark field illumination technique. Because 90 percent of brake-disc defects occur during the casting process (only about 10% are surface or core flaws) and involve indentations, dark field illumination can reliably detect any cavities. Contrast imperfections are handled separately.
Discs are inspected at a rate of approximately 6–10 per minute for the following criteria: diameter and height, imprint or symbols, blowholes, flash, filled ventilation channels, half-fans, bubbles in the fan, cracks, and deformities. Good parts proceed along the conveyor while faulty ones are diverted and ejected from the line for rework. Using Ibea’s custom-designed program, disc parameters can be set, saved, and started up easily by shop-floor personnel.
This simple yet powerful handling and inspection procedure minimizes wear and tear on parts, makes expensive handling robots unnecessary, and provides highly accurate images that also can be used for measurement purposes.
Driving quality and savings
Ibea introduced the brake disc inspection system to the market in 2009. This automated vision solution provides reproducible, series-production quality that dramatically reduces the quantity of faulty parts shipped. According to El Jarad, the manufacturer’s investment can be recouped within 1.5 years.
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