U.S.A.-based AMETEK Surface Vision, a leading provider of automated online surface inspection solutions, delivered a proven SmartView® inspection system to ensure steel quality for ARANIA S.A., a cold rolled steel strip specialist.
Nearly 70% of the steel production goes through the skin pass mill, which significantly increases surface smoothness, unifies thickness and improves mechanical properties. A SmartView® surface inspection system was installed at this point, equipped with a high intensity compact LED beam, high-speed 4K 160MHz linescan camera technology, the latest SmartView SPU sensor processing units hardware, and SmartView 7.2 software.
The optical configuration provided 0.2 mm x 0.2 mm pixel resolution, constantly recorded as streaming video on two 3TB hard disk drives that ensure 30 hours of video buffer. The system was managed by Premium System Server, and the inspection results were presented on Operator Station. Finally, the AMETEK Surface Vision air knife was applied to ensure camera optics were kept free of contamination.
The successful implementation of the automated surface inspection system was a key element in ARANIAs full traceability program, which is crucial for the assurance of its automotive industry customers.
Asier Ibañez de Maeztu, ARANIA S.A. Process Engineer said: The AMETEK Surface Vision system has changed our insights about steel inspection, giving us a clear advantage and consolidating our position in the market. In only nine months we have been able to reduce the customers potential claims by 12%, which gave us a new standard in surface quality. Being able to find the root cause and investigate with visual data provided by AMETEK Surface Vision has also improved our processes and quality standards.
Courtesy of AMETEK Surface Vision.