What are the benefits of 3D Scanning with 3D Machine Vision? It depends on the implementation and will be slightly different in every situation, but the main benefits are:
- Saved Time
- Saved Costs
- Better Quality
Yes, the old adage of “time, cost, quality-pick 2” actually gets tested here. We can’t promise it will help you save on all 3, but we’ll go over some instances of past projects and demonstrate the savings to hopefully give you an idea of where it could be implemented in your process.
How does 3D Scanning / Inspection save time?
We were contacted by a company that has a very outdated scanning system in their test facility. It would take the test technician approximately 20-30 minutes to perform one scanning task and have the software write out data files that the researchers would reference to make product improvements. By updating and expanding the technology and making a replacement system, we were about to reduce that time to under 10 minutes. This equated to a very quick ROI in and of itself. As a bonus it also allowed them to save on purchasing another machine that would work in parallel to remove the bottleneck created by the previous machine.
How does 3D Scanning / Inspection save costs?
If you’ve ever been in a serious aluminum factory, then you gotten to see the massive ingots that are the size of a minibus. You’ve also most likely gotten introduced to the secondary process of scalping the ingot. As the name suggests, it is just taking a large blade and running it as minimally deep as possible to create a very flat, smooth, machined surface on the top of the ingot. The old process was a combination of measurement, math, and guess-and-check.
Sometimes the ingot was shaved too shallow, which created a surface where some of the ingot was flat but also had lower areas that still had a rough cast surface. This would lead to having to put the ingot through the scalper a second time. Which could sometimes lead to the other extreme listed next.
The other (previously unmeasureable) case that could happen is shaving the top of the ingot too deep. On the face of it, cutting more than enough off seems like a safe bet but diving into the numbers–even being a tenth of an inch deeper than needed sends a lot of scrap aluminum back to the oven. Though the scrap is fully recycled, you’re spending a lot on utilities to repeat that metal through the process instead of sending it further down the line for more processing and getting final products out the door.
Scanning the top surface of the ingot to find the lowest point allowed the customer to save enough on scrap that the project paid for itself in under 2 months. Additionally, we were also able to supply a height map of each ingot (before scalping) that allowed them to determine if there were issues with machines in the ingot making process upstream.
How does 3D Scanning / Inspection improve quality?
OK, so this is a bit of a mislabel. As you have read further up in the article, scanning can improve quality indirectly. It’s not a magic wand though, it won’t make you magically start producing better products. But what it can do is enable 100% inspection of your products.
One customer was producing highly machined parts made from extruded aluminum. Even though the extrusion was complex and took a lot of surface complexities out of it, just the machining of (mostly) holes and a few surface features still took about 10 minutes per part. Pfft! Right? NBD.
The complicated part came in the inspection. A very streamlined CMM program took 3 hours to fully inspect this part! That means even random sampling on the batch was a bottleneck.
Where we come in – We’re able to integrate a full 360 scan system and toss in some super software magic which enables the whole GD&T, 100% dimensional check to be performed in under 5 minutes. Matched up to 2 machines, that’s still a 100% batch check to see if a part is good or bad. Six Sigma black belts are losing their minds everywhere.
Need more information or want to talk about an idea?
In this ever changing, ever increasingly fast paced world 3D scanning is taking a more prominent role in the manufacturing process. We are constantly being asked about new unique ways of integrating it into systems that wouldn’t have even been thought of even 5 years ago. If you have a problem and you’re still not sure if 3D scanning can solve it—whether its measuring, counting, checking assembly components—please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Learn more here or Contact Us today!