| ABSTRACT: | 3D COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY - TECHNOLOGY, APPLICATIONS AND PROCESS
INTEGRATION
N. Blessing
Fraunhofer Institute For Manufacturing And Automation, Stuttgart, Germany
In many sectors of the industry geometric inspection of complex parts is currently solved by conventional
measuring procedures using Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMM). This process is very time-consuming
and expensive. In many cases a CMM can only be used with great disadvantages compared to non tactile
technologies. Internal geometries of complex parts can only be digitised after the object is cut, which
automatically leads to losses in the data and difficulties in post-processing, e.g. the alignment of different
data-sets. Furthermore it results in a destroyed part, which is often not wanted, especially in the prototype-
state of the product development chain. The huge number of parts, like engine-blocks, cylinder-heads which
all have complex outer and inner geometry, and the increasing competition on the global market force the
industry to find faster and cheaper methods to bring their products to the market. In the last few years,
industry, in particular automotive industry and their suppliers, became more and more familiar with the
computed tomography technology (CT). The problem which appeared, was to build-up new process-chains
or better, integrate this new technology into existing workflow. The paper will discuss a way to integrate CT
for measurement and quality inspection in the existing process chain and show how it worked in industrial
applications like flow investigations.
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