2008 Award Winners
Award-winning project: No more feathers left
Project partners: WAFIOS AG | Steinbeis Transfer Center Quality Assurance and Image Processing/Ilmenau
In almost every aspect of our daily lives, they ensure that mechanical parts move correctly: springs. We encounter them, for example, as tension springs in drawers or as compression springs in the push-button switches for stairwell lighting. There are around 8,000 springs in a car alone. The quality and dimensional accuracy during their production are therefore of particular importance.
WAFIOS AG in Reutlingen sees itself as a world-leading manufacturer of wire and tube processing machinery, which also includes spring coiling machines. In collaboration with the Steinbeis Transfer Centre for Quality Assurance and Image Processing in Ilmenau, the company’s engineers developed an innovative and user-friendly image processing system for 100 per cent quality control in spring production. It inspects each of up to 600 springs per minute for geometric characteristics such as length or diameter. To do this, an image of the spring is captured immediately before it is cut. Whilst the spring is falling, the specialised evaluation software has approximately 50 ms to measure the aforementioned characteristics in the image and compare them with the specified limits and tolerance ranges.
If, for example, a spring becomes too long, the software intervenes in the process and automatically corrects the spring length so that the next spring is the correct length again. If the tolerance limit is reached, that spring is sorted out via a diverter.
This highly specialised system is also designed to be easy for the machine operator to use. For each new spring geometry, the operator can automatically generate a new test plan by pressing an analysis button and requires no specialist background knowledge of the image processing system.
The complete integration of the hardware and software into the existing machine environment presented a particularly significant challenge. This was successfully implemented by the staff involved from both companies within a very short space of time.