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Noncontact sensor system measures glass thickness

An Armstrong Optical product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Nov 7, 2005

When a European automotive industry supplier needed a production line method to measure the dimensions of windscreen glass it turned to Stil of France and its UK representative Armstrong Optical.

When a major European automotive industry supplier needed a production line method to measure the dimensions of windscreen glass it turned to Stil of France and its UK representative Armstrong Optical.

The need arose from a problem with non-uniform windscreens causing optical aberrations when the vehicle driver viewed the outside world.

The dimensions in question were the overall thickness of the glass/plastic laminate, the thickness of the two glass layers and the interstitial plastic layer - a problem that in the past had been difficult to solve.

A robot-mounted non-contact sensor system was able to automatically detect the air-glass and glass-plastic interfaces and provide a real-time assessment of windscreen thickness providing a solution that was easy to transfer to the production line.

The sensor system was a CHR450 from Stil, used in conjunction with a 1mm depth of field chromatic optical 'pen'.

This gave overall thickness resolution of better than 0.03um - an order of magnitude better than was required.

The CHR450 system has also been used for other production line measurement problems.

For instance, these include online determination of bottle thickness in several places on the bottle, layer thickness evaluation in hologram production, measurement of cylinder roughness and shape in automotive engines.

"Such a sensor solution is not only elegant and extremely cost-effective, but also, since it is non-contact, is relatively easy to integrate into production environments", stated a spokesperson for Armstrong Optical.

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