When you manufacture aircraft engine parts, product quality is more than just a competitive differentiator—it can be a matter of life and death. Having a real-time testing system that automatically measures product quality parameters and then turns that data into a direct feedback loop that influences production systems can be a tremendous asset.

AV&R Vision & Robotics (www.avr-vr.com) makes industrial automation systems for large original equipment manufacturer (OEM) jet engine companies, including systems designed to help the OEM client ensure substandard parts don’t make it off the shop floor and into the OEM’s engines. One of the Montreal, Canada-based company’s principle offerings is a part finishing and inspection system which uses a six-axis robot and smart camera system from Austin, Texas-based National Instruments (NI) (www.ni.com) to examine turbine airfoils following the deburring process.

“In the past, operators inspected and deburred different complex and high-precision turbine airfoils using deburring tools to finish the parts and then manually inspected the airfoils to ensure the parts were within specified tolerance,” explains Michael Muldoon, business solutions engineer, AV&R Vision & Robotics. “We developed a cell that can automatically perform these two processes, ensuring every part leaves the cell with the desired quality.”

After loading the part into the cell, a robot presents it to a deburring station that removes all of the burrs from the root of each airfoil, breaks each edge, and creates a radius on specific edges as per the drawing specifications. The part is displayed to an NI 1722 Smart Camera for inspection to look for surface defects such as nicks, dents, scratches, and tooling marks on the critical surfaces. The defects are classified according to their shape using particle analysis tools in the NI Vision Development Module. After inspection, properly deburred parts are moved to the next production stage while those that fail inspection are removed. The feedback mechanism is integrated into the workstation and thus has an immediate impact on production.

AV&R developed the unit’s human machine interface (HMI) system with NI’s LabView, which allows the operator to quickly understand the status of the system, the part under inspection, and the statistics of each part—including its serial number—as it is processed.

Testing is critical

According to Mike Lochaas, a marketing manager with industrial platform provider Advantech (www.advantech.com) , Milpitas, Calif., measuring, testing and assessing your process is a critical part of any quality control system. In fact, carrying out these activities provides an important underlying foundation that influences not only the quality and consistency of your products, but the efficiency of your production process, your maintenance schedules and your product genealogy programs. Every system that needs production data to function relies on some kind of feedback loop and most of them have some bearing on product quality.

Jan Pingle, a product manager with Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation (www.rockwellautomation.com) suggests there are two primary ways to inform a product quality feedback loop with the data it needs to influence operations. You can either run in-process data collection with automated devices, or you have to go out of process and take samples that are then tested in a lab.

“The typical in-process approach involves a standard historian,” says Pingle, adding that a historian collects data about your manufacturing process and then makes it accessible and understandable to plant floor operators so they know what decisions to make to ensure the smooth running of the operation and the consistent production of quality goods. “That’s the whole idea behind a historian. You measure what happens in real time. Then you load it into an HMI and people can use that to identify problems and make changes.”

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The Milan, Italy-headquartered Luxottica Group (www.luxxotica.com) is another case in point supporting the broad impact appropriately collected and utilized product quality data can have on the business. Luxottica designs, manufactures and distributes fashion, luxury, sport and performance eyewear. The company’s house and license brands include Ray-Ban, Oakley, Bvlgari, Burberry, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Donna Karan, Polo Ralph Lauren and Versace. Unlike AV&R’s aerospace clients, lives are not at stake if a sub-par product escapes from the production line, but the damage such an event could have on a company that differentiates itself with the highest quality eyewear on the market (and pricing to match) would be significant.

When Luxottica went looking for a new manufacturing control system that would provide improved visibility into production ...