In a fiercely competitive global economy, manufacturers and their suppliers are challenged to continuously improve quality and maintain compliance with government and industry mandates-with limited labor and resources. All the while, OEMS are increasing their dependence on suppliers for complex products, assembly operations and services.

Positive Material Identification (PMI) refers to the identification and analysis of various metal alloys based on their chemical composition in nondestructive testing (NDT). Because specifications for materials used in industry are increasingly more specific, the need for PMI testing has been steadily increasing for the past several years.

Quality control professionals, inspectors and machinists have a new cost-effective, reliable option for maintaining wireless data integrity. A complete, robust wireless data collection system that uses a wireless mesh network offers many advantages over conventional data collection.

Genchi Genbutsu, a Japanese QC concept, which loosely translates to “go to the actual spot and see for yourself,” or, in other words, go to the site and form an opinion first-hand, can be applied to the hot area of mobile data collection, in which process measurements are carried out in areas of the plant that auditors or inspectors could not otherwise access with their gages.

One of the jobs of metrology system manufacturers is to make better, more sophisticated products. Ironically, however, they are frequently met with the argument that because inspection is essentially a nonvalue-added process, their efforts in product development run counter to their customers’ needs. Their customers need to reduce costs, and inspection is a cost. Ergo, the price of high-end form and surface metrology systems-and the development of ever more sophisticated ones-is not justified. Instead, they are told, they should concentrate on simpler, more accurate, reliable and less expensive gages for inspection.

Too often in the process of selecting machine vision components, decisions on how all the vision components are to be synchronized are left until the end. Many times this can lead to long and costly system integration time, so it is important to look at the synchronization issues before selecting the system components.

Hall Effect gages are particularly important in the blow molding industry for measurement of wall thickness in plastic bottles and similar containers, as well as many other situations involving relatively thin, nonmagnetic products such as aluminum containers, plastic and glass tubing, scientific glassware, and many small machined or molded plastic and composite parts.

New 3-D analysis capability in stereomicroscopy is available. Conventional stereomicroscopes now transform into true 3-D measurement devices with full analytical capability to generate profile, roughness, area and volumetric measurements.

Within the myriad of inspection systems and technologies available in the industry that are relatively inexpensive and can be fully automated, one inspection technology stands out-eddy current inspection. It is available to the machining industry in two forms: noncontact and contact.

Viewing and quantifying defect damage during a visual inspection has become a critical function of quality control engineers and all borescope operators. This need to quantify inspection data has driven borescope manufacturers to achieve higher levels of system performance.