Today’s tire manufacturers use 3D sensors throughout the manufacturing process for quality control, component placement and product optimization.
In the tire building process 3D sensors are used for extrusion geometry profiling, strip guidance, layer control and splice control. For final tire geometry inspection, sensors provide complete 3D point cloud maps of sidewalls and treads for bulge and dent detection and measure radial and lateral runout.
For both in-process extrusion and final inspection applications, 3D sensors must deliver both high-speed and high-density data in order to meet the manufacturer’s quality specifications.
Why High-Speed, High-Density Data is Essential in Tire Assembly
In-process dimensional gaging and location applications require high-resolution, high-density data to accurately measure features such as small grooves in extrusions. Such applications are often based on wide rubber extrusion patterns consisting of many features all of which must be accurately and reliably verified.
In addition, profiling speed requirements are determined by the target travelling speed, and must be high enough to rapidly determine localized geometry or position variations along the rubber web.
The Solution? 3D Smart Sensors
3D smart sensors offer an ideal solution to this challenge, with megapixel imager-based functionality to generate detailed, accurate cross sectional shape data and inspect shape-based features regardless of the black on black nature of rubber materials.
For very wide targets, such as body ply sheets, which can be up to 1m wide, implementation may require several sensors mounted side-by-side across the web for complete high-resolution profiling. The best of today’s 3D sensors can be easily scaled to provide a single synchronized profile output from multiple sensors.
The Demands of Final Tire Inspection Applications
Final tire inspection stations have a challenging requirement; namely, the need to detect bulges and dents as small as ten microns in height, which indicate internal defects. These imperfections can occur anywhere on the tire sidewall and must be detected with very high reliability.
Since the locations of small defects can occur anywhere on the sidewall, 3D sensors must provide high data density across the entire profile in order to detect them accurately. Also, very high profile data rates up to 4kHz are required for closely spaced profiles as the tire rotates at up to 60 rpm in the inspection station.
Finally, tire sidewall inspection requires 3D sensors to buffer, align and deterministically deliver full sidewall 3D point clouds directly to the tire analysis system so cycle times meet factory reporting criteria.
