Digital radiographic inspection technique for production friendly quality assessment of PM parts

Abstract

Progress with the EU DIRA-Green/AutoInspect programme is reported. The target of the programme is to develop the capability for inspection of powder metallurgy (PM) parts – including sintered parts, ideally inline – in production environments, to improve the quality of output batches and to reduce scrap to the greatest possible extent. An important component of the inspection system, which is based on digital radiography, is the development of an advanced data processing system for pattern recognition and feature characterisation. This system will utilise modern image processing and pattern recognition techniques such as the Canny algorithm, active shape modelling and comparison with traditional cross-correlation and distance template matching. It is anticipated that the developed quality control system will be sufficiently versatile to favour its adoption by the wider PM community, among other industry sectors. In particular, the pattern recognition capability will be useful for integration into image processing and automation systems.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme managed by REA Research Executive Agency http://ec.europa.eu/rea/ (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 283288. The AutoInspect project is a collaboration between the following organisations: Accent Pro 2000 srl, MIMTech ALFA SL, Polkom Badania, InnotecUK, Federal Mogul, TWI Ltd, Brunel Innovation Centre, Brunel University, Vienna University of Technology (www.autoinspectproject.eu). This paper is based on a contribution to the Euro PM 2012 Congress organised by EPMA in Basel, Switzerland on 16–19 September 2012.