System solutions for the inspection of adhesive and sealant application
Adhesives and sealants are used in numerous industrial application areas, including automotive manufacturing, shipbuilding and aircraft construction, the production of household appliances and acoustic elements. Defective seals and sealing seams can impair functionality, safety or the visual impression and can not correct after assembly.
For quality assurance, fully automatic optical inspection systems are used for non-contact testing. Typically, the position, course and width of the seams or the completeness of sealing foam and thermal conductive pastes are checked.
VisionTools offers a comprehensive product range for these applications.
- Systems for testing in-process, during application or post-process, i.e. downstream.
- Any seam geometry can be tested
- Detection of interruptions, thickening, neck downs and positional errors
- Teach-in by automatic teach run and simple parameterisation by the user
- Position recognition for correcting the test areas in case of workpiece position fluctuations within definable limits
- Intuitive software user interface for setting parameters
- Error visualisation on the monitor
- Storage of all individual results and test images for later evaluation and documentation
- Robust, industrial-grade system components with industry-standard M12 circular connectors and Gigabit Ethernet
In-process
Complete inspection with an all-round view - directly during sealant application
With in-process or in-line glue path control, a sensor unit is mounted directly on the application tool. A robot guides the application tool with sensor over the respective workpiece or vice versa, the workpiece along the glue nozzle. In both cases, the adhesive bead is inspected directly during adhesive application. For automated rework of defects, the camera system identifies the beginning and end of the repair path. This functionality is optionally available for all in-process controls, regardless of robot manufacturer and dispensing device.
- No additional cycle time required
- No additional inspection point required
- High inspection speed
- Only one sensor unit
The compact Cyclospotter camera head combines 3 CCD sensors in one housing, for a 360° view of the adhesive bead. In difficult contrast conditions, the temperature difference between the sealing seam and the application surface can be imaged with the Cyclospotter-T with IR sensors.
Post-process
Control after the application with a flexible multi-camera system
With post-inspection, the workpiece is only inspected after the sealing bead has been completely applied. For this purpose, the workpiece is presented in one or more positions in front of a multi-camera system with stationary cameras.
- Adhesive bead is only inspected shortly before installation
- Further slippage of the bead due to the subsequent robot movement is improbable
- Plant-specific, individual system set-ups with different working distances
Our modular, PC-based camera systems of the VoE product line can be easily integrated into production. The camera systems can be expanded at any time without having to modify existing system components.
The evaluation of the images and communication to plc are realised with the standard image processing software VisionTools V60. Ready-made software solutions in the form of project files that have been tried and tested many times are available for checking the adhesive and sealant applications. No programming is required. All settings can be made with the intuitive user dialogue. Images and test results are clearly displayed, defective sections are visualised in a component overview. By clicking on individual results, the corresponding images of the bonding area are displayed.
