Extrusion International 3-2023

42 Extrusion International 3/2023 MEASUREMENT AND INSPECTION TECHNOLOGY ProfilControl 7 S CorrugatedTube More Flexible Surface Inspection in Corrugated Tube Production Extrusion line operators have been experiencing a growing demand for customized mass production. This means that they have to produce an increasingly growing number of product variants. Therefore, line operators are looking for ways to speed up their production processes and make them more cost-efficient. With a new upgrade for the ProfilControl 7 S CorrugatedTube inline inspection system, PIXARGUS reduces the handling effort of quality inspection in corrugated tube production. The magic word is “process-adapted quality control”. I n corrugated tube extrusion, in- spection systems not only have to deal with alternating sections of cor- rugated and plane structures. Cer- tain tube sections may require other inspectionmodes. Or, the corrugator may engrave features into the ex- truded product that must not be de- tected as defects. For this, ProfilCon - trol 7 S CorrugatedTube now offers special algorithms that take automa- tion in quality inspection to a new level. “It is our aim to supply systems that ideally work without any setting up to be performed by the opera- tor,” says Jürgen Philipps, Managing Director and Head of Technological Development at PIXARGUS. Software that adapts to different inspection tasks along corrugated tubes In addition to their characteris- tic corrugations, corrugated tubing may consist of periodically recurring sections with features that require special inspection. Automotive cus- tomers may order sets of different corrugated tubes, for example, for the assembly of engine blocks. It is possible to produce these sets of tubing in a corrugator line as a con- tinuous product. A new algorithm of the inspection software now au- tomatically recognizes where one of the sections within a set ends and the next one starts. If for one or sev- eral of the tube sections different inspection tasks apply, the algorithm ensures that the correct inspection parameters are used in each individ- ual case. This makes handling faster and simpler, even in case of a highly diversified product mix. ProfilControl 7 S CorrugatedTube offers special algorithms to advance automation in quality inspection. The inspection system automatically recognizes different product sections and checks them for defects such as holes, dents, bubbles, etc. according to their individual inspection parameters Surface inspection of corrugated tubes used to be extremely difficult terrain for quality control. Inspection systems have to deal not only with alternating sections of corrugated and plane structures, but also with tube sections that require different inspection modes. The new upgrade to the ProfilControl 7 CorrugatedTube software now accomplishes this challenging task automatically