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Product category: Rapid Prototyping
News Release from: 3D Scanners | Subject: ModelMaker
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial Team on 08 August 2002

3D scanning makes worldwide savings for
Nissan

After scanning the world, Nissan chose ModelMaker to deliver operational and quality improvements, combined with significant cost reductions in the inspection of pressed car panels.

After scanning the world, Nissan chose ModelMaker from 3D Scanners to deliver operational and quality improvements, combined with significant cost reductions in the inspection of pressed car panels, and the tooling used to produce such items Today subsequent, multiple, worldwide installations are seeing Nissan well on the way to halving their gauge costs in this area within the next five years

The multinational car maker's leading quality team XiO - established in Japan to ensure the adoption of best quality practice at all Nissan sites worldwide - determined that noncontact laser scanning offered significant operational, quality, and cost benefits compared with the more traditional methods of using contact probes on Cartesian driven CMMs (co-ordinate measuring machines).

Further investigation led them to the UK, and to 3D Scanners.

Subsequent orders have meant that this UK based company is now equipping some 20 Nissan factories worldwide including locations in Japan, USA, Mexico, Spain, and not least in the UK in Sunderland.

Traditionally panel measurement in the auto industry involves the use of hard gauges (checking fixtures) which although created from component CAD data are susceptible to manufacturing tolerances and, even if checked on the best of Cartesian CMMs can only be guaranteed to be accurate at a finite number of probed positions.

The use of such methods does not allow a comprehensive component inspection - particularly where complex pressed forms are involved; nevertheless it is still extremely time consuming, and demands a high skill and experience level to take and interpret readings.

Another significant downside to this approach is the lead-time and cost involved in this hard approach; a typical car set of press panel gauges will number between 55 and 60, and cost in the order of GBP 1.3 million.

Nissan concede that the total hard-gauging cost for a recent model was GBP 4.5 million, it comprised some 120 gauges, and the on-going storage and maintenance costs are not insignificant.

Nissans Sunderland facility alone is now on course to achieve savings of GBP 600,000 in press panel inspection, by moving to 3D laser scanning.

Laser scanning overcomes the above shortcomings.

ModelMaker from 3D Scanners is the world's most widely used 3D scanning system; it is fast, flexible, portable, robust, accurate, easy to use, and low cost.

It comprises a noncontact optical measurement facility mounted on a Faro articulated arm CMM, and it can digitise an object in a fraction of the time taken by a touch-probe.

A safe, low-powered laser scans the total surface of the component to produce data sets rather than just measure key dimensions.

The proximity of the measured points is so close, and the number of readings taken is so great that dense point clouds of data are recorded.

Dedicated software compares this information with original CAD data and enables all QA requirements to be met automatically.

At Nissan's Sunderland plant, QA engineer Ian Bargman offers a graphic illustration of the productivity improvements, and other benefits that ModelMaker gives them.

On the old method, a body trial - taking some 300 measurements - could take about 20 hours, whereas ModelMaker can take up to 14,000 readings per second.

He states: "Full panel analysis via ModelMaker enables us to know immediately if any aspect of a panel has fallen outside manufacturing tolerances - and (if so) by how much.

This makes for considerable cost savings in terms of die manufacture and reduced part rejection at the assembly stage".

A further benefit is its use as a reverse engineering tool.

Periodic scanning of press tools helps to create a record of their development history.

In the event of tool damage this data enables a tool to be rebuilt to its (true) contemporary condition, as opposed to its original (theoretical) condition.

Bargman concludes by confirming: "Very simply, having ModelMaker available to us as both an inspection and reverse engineering tool is having a major positive impact on the speed and quality of our manufacturing - both here in the UK and worldwide".

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