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| ProfilControl 7 DX WPC from PIXARGUS ensures 100% inspection of the entire board profile in a continuous, inline process |
A leading US manufacturer of sustainable decking products made of wood-plastic composites (WPC) uses measuring technology made in Germany for its quality control. The PIXARGUS inline system, ProfilControl 7 DX WoodPlasticComposites, ensures 100% inspection of the entire board profile in a continuous, inline process. As a premiere, the system inspects even highly critical features, such as the grooved edges of the boards, with the highest accuracy – and with minimum handling effort, from quick commissioning and set-up through to automated switch-over from one product variant to another.
OPC-UA interface is the pathway to fully automatic manufacturing
This renowned US deck board producer has recently made great strides in automating its production processes. In 2022, all process steps, machines and equipment were networked and linked with the higher-level control systems. The company now uses the new smart inspection system from German measuring specialists PIXARGUS to make quality control of its extruded deck boards a fully automatic process.
The camera-based digital inline inspection system ProfilControl 7 DX WPC from PIXARGUS comes with an OPC-UA interface that allows it to smoothly and seamlessly integrate with the manufacturer’s process chain and communicate with the various control units and downstream processes in real time.
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| The measuring system provides quality data for downstream processes and adapts automatically when production switches |
Automatic product grading and switching
In addition to providing 100% inspection of the deck boards in a continuous process, the measuring system’s smart software is also instrumental in grading the products fully automatically. Boards graded as defect-free are automatically stacked ready for dispatch.
The link between the PIXARGUS system and the manufacturer’s higher-level control systems also enables automatic switching from one product variant to another. Upon a signal received from the line control system, ProfilControl 7 DX WPC automatically adjusts to the inspection parameters of the new product – during running production.
100% inspection even of critical features such as deep grooves
After the deck boards have been cut to length, the eight high-resolution cameras of the ProfilControl 7 DX WPC system capture the contours of the boards in an inline process, checking all radii, angles, distances, lengths, heights and widths. For the use case at the US deck board manufacturer, PIXARGUS has positioned the cameras in such a way that also the entire grooved edges of the deck boards can be measured. These grooves will later accommodate the fasteners to install the decking.
While the standard measuring systems the US customer had used in the past were only able to measure either the height or the depth of the groove, ProfilControl 7 DX WPC uses a specially adapted sensor head to measure both parameters of the highly challenging groove geometry simultaneously with just one measurement (IMG 4).
