Imec, the world's leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technology, and UAntwerpen this week presented software to do real-time, in-line inspection of the inside of complex quality products. Using 3D image reconstruction, you can inspect the inside of an object per second without damaging the object.
This will make it possible to detect, for example, rotten apples or errors in the assembly of electro-mechanical products as they roll by on the assembly line. It is the first time that such 3D inspection speed has been demonstrated with X-ray, and this allows a solution to be created that can be deployed in-line in industrial environments. Thanks to a unique combination of flexible hardware and software, the technology is widely applicable in the fields of manufacturing, health, agrofood, etc. The breakthrough is the result of a cooperation between UAntwerpen, KULeuven, UGent, Robovision, Terumo and XRE led by Visionlab, an imec research group at UAntwerpen, within the imec.icon project iXCon in which imec conducts research commissioned by - and in close collaboration with - Flemish industrial partners.
Inspection of medical needles
When it comes to the mass production of medical products, quality is indispensable, which is why Terumo has integrated various visual camera inspection techniques into its various production lines. Terumo aims to continuously improve quality monitoring during the production process and on the finished products. Thanks to the technology developed in the iXCon project, Terumo is now also able to use 3D X-ray inspection to inspect one product per second. During a fast X-ray scan, single images are taken throughout each product, and after a three-dimensional reconstruction, software analyses whether the internal mechanism meets all quality requirements.
Henk Houf, COO/VP Manufacturing & Operations Terumo EMEA: "Being able to deploy this new innovative technology will certainly allow us to take our quality controls to an even higher level. An important aspect for Terumo with this technology is its flexibility and deployability in an industrial, high speed, high quality environment and this for several of our products.
Fast, flexible and widely applicable
The Terumo case is one of three concrete applications developed in the iXCon project. Two agricultural applications were also developed, for quality inspection of harvested apples and for automatic planting of crops. The starting point of the iXcon project was laid by the ASTRA toolbox, which is a 3D tomography framework developed by VisionLab, an imec research group at UAntwerpen, which enjoys worldwide recognition and the cooperation of the research groups involved in a previous basic research project.
A key factor to increase inspection performance and speed is being able to feed the software with prior knowledge about the product being scanned. For example, not only were technical drawings available of the Terumo products, but you can also input properties of apples about their shape and composition.
In the next phase, a hardware setup will also be built at Visionlab that will be extremely flexible and will allow many different products to be scanned and measurement methods to be developed and validated in a short time.
Current applications are developed for inspection with X-rays. But the software can also be applied together with other imaging methods such as visual, infrared or hyperspectral inspection. The combination of all these techniques makes the technology applicable in just about any sector where visual non-destructive quality control of products is required.
Source: Imec
