(NRK: Williamsburg, VA) -- The past 15 years have seen an expansion of metrology use throughout the manufacturing process, particularly in the case of large-scale manufacturing. The need for greater efficiencies has made the demand for precision measurement greater than ever. Generally speaking, metrology-assisted assembly with advanced metrology equipment and sophisticated software, such as SpatialAnalyzer (SA) from New River Kinematics, results in shorter production cycles and greater cost efficiency.
For measuring large-scale parts like those used in aircraft manufacturing and shipbuilding, portable metrology instruments offer convenient, user-friendly solutions. Software like SA can integrate multiple instruments, as well as synthesize and optimize data from a multitude of sources. SA enables users to share equipment and therefore choose the combination of measurement technologies that best fits the measurement job—all with a common interface and the capability of running any number of measurement sensors simultaneously.
An instrument-independent, traceable 3D graphical software platform, SA makes it easy for users to analyze data, build, inspect, automate, report, and reverse-design a variety of parts and tools. SA interfaces and can simultaneously communicate with virtually any number and type of portable metrology instrument. With the ability to integrate data from multiple instruments, SA helps users find the best combination to improve accuracy, save time, and reduce scrap to improve productivity. Click here to learn more about SA.
Attend the free SA webinar and learn more about SA’s capabilities and functionality. Regardless of whether you are a new or veteran SA user, the webinar will teach you something new and you’ll have the chance to send in live questions. Click here to register for the live webinar.
Our latest software release, SA 2012.07.09, contains many new features and capabilities. We’ve collectively named many of these additions the “SA Toolkit,” which includes a new toolbar that gives users quick access to functionality related to GD&T, relationships, part inspection, analysis, and reporting.
• GD&T. The GD&T bar enables you to define GD&T-compliant checks against nominal CAD or primitive geometry. Checks not requiring nominal geometry can be performed solely with measured points.
• Relationships. The Relationships tab enables one-click definition of features (defined by CAD or using primitive geometry) primed for easy, dynamic inspection, with or without the use of projection planes. Other relationships can be easily defined as well.
• Inspection. The Inspection tab presents all measurable features in a job—as well as GD&T checks—in a single list. This allows you to easily advance through an inspection routine, recording measurements for each feature, and instantly providing inspection results against nominal data.
• Analysis. Some of the more commonly used analysis tools, such as the frame wizard and geometry fitting, are presented together in the Analysis tab.
• Reporting. Functionality for creating reports, making dimensions, and creating and annotating callout views is gathered together in the Reporting tab.
The webinar will demonstrate how an inspection routine can be defined by simply clicking features on a CAD part, then show how easy it is to perform the inspection by advancing through the list of features. You’ll see how quickly these results can be sent to a custom report. For those working without the benefit of a CAD model, the webinar will demonstrate a similar process using primitive geometry defined from a drawing instead of CAD.
Inspecting parts to verify quality assurance and determine satisfaction of design requirements has traditionally been performed using simple best-fit or point-to-surface alignments. Such approaches are inflexible and often result in scrapped parts, rework, or time-consuming manual tweaking in an attempt to establish an alignment that will satisfy all design constraints. The webinar introduces a more powerful approach using SA’s relationship optimization capabilities. We’ll examine a part that has multiple inspection requirements and show how traditional alignment techniques will produce results that do not satisfy those requirements. Then we’ll introduce SA’s weighting, constraint, and optimization techniques in which design requirements can be defined in the software, and the software handles the optimization of the alignment to satisfy those requirements.
SA combines point-cloud scanning interfaces with advanced tools for feature fitting and automatic sphere extraction. You can also automatically extract features from scan data for easy comparison to CAD or analysis with GD&T. During the webinar, we’ll start with raw scanner data and extract registration spheres, perform an alignment, filter the data, and compare it to a CAD model to demonstrate point cloud capabilities in SA.
SA’s Measurement Plans enable you to generate scripts that can greatly improve workflow and productivity. The ability to automate functions and incorporate logic can reduce analysis time from days to minutes while eliminating errors and saving significant resources. During the webinar, we will show how a Measurement Plan can automate the previous point-cloud process and accomplish the same tasks in a matter of seconds.
Click here to register for the SA webinar on Tues., Aug. 21, 2012, at 2 p.m, EDT/11 a.m. PDT.
New River Kinematics (NRK) is an engineering company focused on creating high quality software that provides comprehensive production solutions in a variety of industry settings (aerospace, shipbuilding, energy, and satellite). We use our comprehensive toolkit of software components, custom software development skills, and engineering expertise to solve engineering problems quickly and efficiently.
