Manufacturing speed and innovative designs are two crucial issues affecting whether or not a manufacturer can lead the mobile telephone market. Therefore, mobile phone manufacturers have put considerable efforts into accelerating the product development process, including the introduction of 3-D scanners into the prototyping and quality control stages to significantly speed up the overall manufacturing process.
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Compared with CMMs or microscope measuring methods, 3-D scanning obtains much more data at a much faster speed. Typically for each scan shot, a 3-D scanner acquires information for two to five million points on the object. Based on this information, professional inspections such as distortion analysis, distance measurement, and so on, can be carried out automatically in inspection software. In this way, the overall cost can be noticeable cut down by simplifying and shortening the entire designing process and skipping trial and error stages. Moreover, even free-form surfaces of the object can be inspected, which also contributes to improving the objects’ exterior quality.
Serving this market need is Solutionix’s Rexcan III 3-D scanner, which works with the company’s ARX 300 control and view-synchronized automation engine. Due to the system’s fully automated 3-D scanning process, the reliability and repeatability of the scan data is improved considerably by removing human interruptions, even with different operators. The system is therefore currently in use by many mobile phone manufacturers. The 3-D scanning process has also been simplified in this way, thereby reducing the measuring time.
Fixing the object on ARX 300’s jig is a very simple process. Because the jig’s frame information has already been stored in the computer, 3-D scan data of the entire object (top and bottom, up and down, front and rear, etc.) can be aligned accurately and automatically. Moreover, targets on the object are no longer needed, which means no missing points anymore.
Figure 1: “Mounting the object into ARX 300” | Figure 2: “Control-and-view synchronization” |
With ARX 300, 3-D scanning processes are implemented automatically along a pre-set or customized scan path, which can be created, edited, saved, or used even for objects with similar shapes.
The auto-scan process begins along the loaded scan path. With synchronized object and model viewing windows, the user can always observe missing areas on the 3-D model and take extra scan shots to implement them directly.
With the batch processing function in Solutionix’s ezScan software module, scan patches are aligned automatically in a very precise way, and then merged into a single triangular mesh.
Differences between the CAD design data and the 3-D scan data will be color-indicated after the inspection software aligns two data sets together. Excessive areas will be shown in red, and short areas will be shown in blue. Distortion reports are also available.
Figure 5: “Distortion inspection” | Figure 6: “Section inspection” |
Previously, 3-D measurements and inspection of assembly features such as hole positions, plate shapes, and patterns were carried out by CMMs, which was extremely time-consuming and expensive. But now, with Rexcan III (and more specifically its image-acquiring capability), such tasks can be finished in a much more efficient way.
Regarding dimensional applications, the focus is on verification of the mobile phone’s length and width. These very important specifications were previously measured manually with rulers. Rexcan significantly improves this and other measurement inspection processes, both in time and precision.
Rexcan III is popular among mobile phone manufacturers and their suppliers for several reasons:
- 3-D scan data can be saved for back up, documentation, and later reuses by both designers and the manufacturer
- Data materials can be accessed, transferred, and evaluated much more easily and efficiently between parties throughout the process, which can also be speeded up significantly
- Due to the 3-D scan ability of Rexcan III, inspection of free-form objects has become possible, which also contributes to enhancing the quality of products
- 3-D scan database can be used for improving working environment for prototyping and manufacturing
- Errors due to human mistakes can be avoided
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