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Polymer seals are used throughout the automobile for a variety of purposes, and the consequences of a failure of such a seal can range from annoying in case of an A/C component to catastrophic in the case of brake components. With the constantly increasing demands for these components regarding e.g. pressure, tighter tolerances or new refrigerants come more stringent requirements for ensuring surface properties according to the specification for the specific application. While automatic inspection systems are available for a variety of defects, the area of seal inspection is still dominated by manual labor, partly because handling of these small, inexpensive parts is difficult and partly because visual coverage of the entire sealing surface poses a problem. It is also difficult for a human inspector to objectively assess whether or not a surface defect is critical, especially given that inspection of each seal must be completed within a few seconds.

Weight and heat management of performance aluminum alloy pistons leads to complex piston designs that can be difficult to manufacture compared to conventional pistons. In order to verify the casting quality and detect pores, cracks and other defects, the use of X-ray testing methods is inevitable. While automatic 2D X-ray image processing has become a standard quality control method for simple cast parts, 3D volume processing is not yet widely used. The main reason is usually not the cost difference between 2D and 3D X-ray, but rather the processing time required for image acquisition. Compared to often only a few images required to cover a part using 2D X-ray images, a CT reconstruction requires a large number of images to minimize reconstruction artifacts.

Legal requirements in some countries require vehicle manufacturers to reliably document the type, origin and manufacturing dates of the tires mounted to a vehicle. This data accompanies the vehicle and can be stored in a database in the destination country, e.g. in case a recall needs to be issued for a certain type of tire and manufacturing period. If manufacturers need to document the DOT code of tires mounted on a vehicle, it is advantageous to replace current manual labor required for this task with automatic equipment. This paper details the results of a study performed in cooperation with a major German car manufacturer to automate the process of reading the DOT code of the tires mounted on rims directly before vehicle assembly to fulfill required tracing requirements. Different approaches to reading the DOT code are discussed in the paper, including the difficulties that were encountered with various standard methods.

The inspection of steel welds is a requirement in many safety critical applications, with X-rays offering an excellent visual aid in quality monitoring of such parts. In order to penetrate the steel and the weld, high energy X-rays are usually required though, depending on the material's thickness and the length of material the X-ray beams must traverse. The high beam energies can seriously degrade the X-ray detectors' life expectancy and image quality, so in order to ensure consistent image quality traditional X-ray film has been used, in spite of its drawbacks regarding the ecological impact of the chemical process and the significant efforts involved if archives of the welds must be maintained. This paper presents an alternative solution to the traditional photochemical archival approach using a custom X-ray detector developed specifically for the inspection of welded seams.

Computed Tomography (CT) is a well established method for non-destructive reconstruction of an object's interior structures. It is especially well suited for use with e.g. light metal alloys, injection molded plastic components or composite materials. The CT volume data can either be evaluated manually or automatically through the use of image processing software. Recently helical CT has become available for use in industrial quality testing of light alloy cast parts. This paper discusses the use of helical CT as an additional tool for inline inspection in a production environment.

Sheet-of-light is a standard method for 3D scanning of a variety of surfaces. While sheet-of-light is a fast and precise means of measurement of an object's surface geometry, the scans produced by such a system lack an important surface property, namely the surface color. Through the use of multiple sheet-of-light cameras in conjunction with color cameras mounted in a calibrated setup, it is possible to extract color surfaces of a variety of objects at very high speeds making this method ideally suited for inline inspection of parts. This paper discusses the principles of operation behind this approach as well as various aspects to take into account when designing such as system, including application examples and measured data.

The results of automatic X-ray inspection of cast parts rely heavily on the quality of the imaging components. Flat panel detectors suffer from a number of flaws, the most serious being long-term stability and image quality. This paper presents a new X-ray detector design which can increase defect detection quality, cost efficiency and long term stability of an industrial automatic X-ray inspection system.

Bead to Bead contour measurement can be a valuable testing tool in many areas of tire tests. Endurance testing as well as tire research can benefit from the knowledge gained through non-destructive, contactless tire tests using bead-to-bead sheet-of-light sensors. The quality criteria used by tire manufacturers were defined when single track geometry measurement systems were prevalent in tire manufacturing. With the advent of sheet-of-light systems it is necessary to consider adapting these criteria to ensure more precise fault evaluation compared to single point systems and take advantage of the additional data provided by a sheet-of-light system.

Sheet of light measurement is increasingly displacing laser triangulation measurement systems in various areas of tire manufacturing and testing because this method provides measurements across an entire width of material instead of just a single measurement track. Careful analysis of the measurement task is essential before system design to optimize the setup and achieve best results.