Inline Inspection Technologies for Processing of dry fibre materials

Abstract - Quality control for dry material placement still requires manual inspection and thus leads to a substantial reduction in overall productivity. In this paper we describe recent developments in the field of automatic inspection systems, with a particular focus on methods that can be integrated into the production process. For dry material placement the measurement of fiber orientations and the inline detection of various types of defects turned out to be most important. Two different sensor technologies based on machine vision have been developed for this purpose and their properties have been analyzed. Additionally, emphasis was also put on the data management, especially how to acquire and process the large amounts of data, this also includes methods for making the data available for follow-up processing steps, such as part verification systems. Experimental results on a full-scale dry material placement machine will be presented.