Mold and Die Inspection
using the EOIS Mini-Moiré Sensor

EOIS's distributor in the Detroit area, Inspection Technologies Inc.(ITI) recently performed service work for a manufacturer of molded composite parts. The customer had several molds for the same part, but each mold was different. Some molds produced good parts, and some did not. The customer was forced to rework or scrap parts made from the bad molds. The customer had unsuccessfully attempted to repair the molds using discrete touch probe measurements, and trial and error techniques. What the customer needed was sophisticated process analysis using high density surface data, to identify manufacturing process variations, establish root causes and verify corrections made.

ITI used an EOIS Mini-Moiré sensor with a portable FaroArm® (see below). This portable scanner was able to inspect the molds in-place, to avoid shutting down the production line.

The scanner quickly captured high-density surface data, in order to accurately identify variations in the part shape (see below). The scanner was fast enough to completely digitize both sides of the mold, to identify mismatch problems.

The data was transferred to Imageware Surfacer for registration and analysis, using the EOIS binary data format. The dense data eliminated the subjectivity of manually selecting a few discrete measurement points. It provided a full surface view of the part variations, and allowed analysis using automated fitting routines.

In the first year after using the EOIS Mini-Moiré sensor, the customer saved almost $1M in rework and scrap expenses.