State-of-the-art inspection equipment for the wires & cables printers

Introduction

No one can deny that “high efficiency” is one of the most incentive terms for?manufacturing industries. That is the reason why many companies continuously invest in new machinery as well as necessary upgrades for their existing production lines yet for some reason they seem to overlook the importance of their inspection tools.

In this regard, Pioneer Machinery tries to bring some changes to the wire & cable industry by merging cable printers with?Automated Optical Inspection (AOI)?technology, which allows the automatic inspection of the printing results via its grading system.

Problems of traditional inspecting methods

Human eyes can’t successfully read nor recognize any written text on the surface of a cable that is running at any speed above 10 m/s. Therefore, when it comes to printing inspection, people usually rely on one of these two methods: “finished product visual inspection” and “stroboscope inspection”.?

Finished Product Visual Inspection

In the first case, the operator would have to visually inspect the finished cable, which has been previously winded into coils or bobbins. This method not only does not allow the detection of the flaw in real time but also implies a substantial amount of waste once the flaw is detected afterward.?

Stoboscope Inspection

Certainly, the use of a?stroboscope?brings some advantages when dealing with visual inspection in cable printing. The high frequency of the flash triggers?vision persistence?which freezes the image of the moving cable. This is very convenient when the operator flashes the stroboscope pointing at the cable. However, in practice operators need to check the printing quality every time after altering the line speed, but without auto-sync, it may take a long time trying to adjust strobe frequency to adapt to the new speed. Moreover, long-period staring at the flashing images causes syndromes like headaches, eye-soaring, and even vision deterioration. It’s not a so-called worker-friendly environment, isn’t it?

Features of the AOI cable printer

How does the AOI cable printer solve the above-mentioned problems? The AOI cable printer consists of an?HMI, the AOI system, and the printer itself:?

• The HMI allows operators to easily inspect the printed text directly through a screen.?
• The whole essence of the AOI system resides in the?high-speed camera?which takes up to 50 FPS (frames per second) while synchronizing with line speed automatically.
• The AOI system determines the flaws through a grading system. In case the printed text does not meet a certain standard when compared with the source pattern, the system will trigger a notification.

As you can see, applying the cable printer with AOI technology is like gaining a quality-checking assistant to help you execute the whole quality-control process.

Conclusion

Pursuing higher efficiency is the most effective way for cable makers to increase both capacity and profit. Not only the production equipment but also those inspection tools should be upgraded as well. Maybe it’s time to embrace these changes.

Appendix

Comparison between each inspection methods

Infographic about the AOI Cable Printer

Take a look at the specification of the AOI printer: https://www.pioneerm.com/en/extrusion-lines.html