100 Percent Quality

Three-Dimensional Weld Seam Inspection on Front Suspension Subframes The task A motor manufacturer welds front suspension subframes on a production line. The aluminum components are welded together automatically at two stations. An automatic visual check assesses the quality of the weld seam prior to the part arriving at the second welding station. The 3D visual measurement ensures that the welds from the first station have adequate throat thickness. If parts are found to be non-compliant they are automatically ejected for manual rework. Benefit Manual visual inspection of welds is a highly subjective assessment. The VIROwsi seam inspection system on the other hand, meets the requirements for 100-percent inspection and delivers a specific, objective analysis of the quality of the seam. The inspection system digitizes the surface of the weld seam in three dimensions and calculates the throat thickness for each point along the length of the seam. The determined throat thickness is compared with predefined limits to allow fault detection. An automatically generated log file records all inspection results. This data can be subsequently used for statistical analysis and process control, enabling optimization of the welding process. Individual warning limits may also be defined to provide early warning of production drift prior to tolerance limits being ex-ceeded. An identifying barcode is attached to each subframe. The information on the barcode is transferred into the production monitoring system and is stored in the log file. This enables inspection results and measurements to be later traced back to an individual part. Implementation The inspection system is installed directly alongside the welding robots in a welding cell. VI-ROwsi consists of a sensor head fastened to a robot and an analysis computer. The sub-frames to be inspected are located in the welding jigs. The sensor is moved over the seams at a speed of up to 100 mm/second. An optical fiber link guarantees interference free trans-fer of data between the sensor and the analysis computer. The inspection results are proc-essed in the computer, logged, presented visually and transferred to the robot controller. Interface: Discrete I/O Robot speed: approx. 100 mm/s Sensor Type: 500 Hz Scan Width: approx. 30 mm To weld distance: approx. 70 mm Depth: approx. 40 mm Data transfer: Optical fiber

How helpful was this information to you: Select ratingCancel ratingPoorOkayGoodGreatAwesome