System measures small surfaces of cylinders

Until recently, inspecting the inner faces of small cylinders has been a complex task for any industrial image-processing system. Because of the small internal diameters of many cylinders, it has been difficult to create an imager with the necessary optics and illumination that could fit inside the bore of such cylinders.

Now, Sirius Advanced Cybernetics (Karlsruhe, Germany) has developed a new imaging system that it claims can inspect the surfaces of cylinders with internal diameters as small as 30 mm.

In the inspection process, a contact image sensor (CIS) is first fed into the cylinder. Next, the sensor is rotated by 360 degrees to scan the entire inner faces of the cylinder simultaneously. After the images have been captured, the defects can then be evaluated and classified.

Sirius Advanced Cybernetics claims that the system it has developed is suitable for inspecting matte and glossy surfaces as well as metallic surfaces that also may be coated.

-- By Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design