Acquisition boosts motor and gearbox quality

The Lego Company is using the LabView graphical development environment and NI PCI-based data acquisition boards in its quality assurance department.

The Lego Company is using the LabView graphical development environment and NI PCI-based data acquisition boards in its quality assurance department to test and optimise the lifetimes of its electric motor-based products, including popular toys ranging from race cars to speedboats and the new out-door RC-car "Dirt Crushers".

With a LabView-based data-logging and test system, Lego engineers increased the number of successful quality tests performed daily by up to 20 times, helping the company significantly reduce time to market for its new releases.

"Without LabView, we could not have improved the effectiveness of our test systems as quickly as we did", said Niels Duedahl, Vice President of the Lego Global Supply Chain.

"Overall, we have experienced efficiency gains that were impossible to imagine a few years ago and improved our testing by a factor of 20".

"With the ability to perform many simultaneous tests on our motors and gearboxes and acquire more accurate data, we can more quickly deliver motor-based products that are more thoroughly tested and longer-lasting to our customers".

In the past, Lego quality engineers logged their test data manually and created individual test setups that constantly required modification for each product tested.

With the easy-to-use hardware-configuration capabilities of LabView and the flexibility of NI PCI-based data acquisition boards, they now can quickly design customised tests for each product and usually run eight separate tests simultaneously.

With these automated tests running continuously, Lego engineers avoid having to restart tests that failed while unsupervised overnight, thus increasing the throughput of their tests by 10 to 20 times.

Also, the powerful and reliable data-logging capabilities of LabView provide Lego engineers with more accurate data, helping them analyse possible mechanical wear on vehicular products that might upset motor performance.

With the ability to pinpoint the mechanical wear, they can re-engineer the products or make mechanical modifications that significantly increase motor lifetime and performance.

"We have dramatically improved the lifetime of our motors and gear boxes", said Bjarke Schoenwandt, Lego Quality Specialist.

"With LabView, we can easily set up flexible tests and run them without requiring 24-hour supervision".

"Before we incorporated LabView, our engineers waited weeks before they could analyse lifetime-test results after making mechanical adjustments to a product, but we now can obtain error-free feedback from these modifications in a matter of days and quickly make decisions for optimising the motor and lifetimes".

NI LabView is a graphical development environment for creating flexible and scalable test, measurement and control applications rapidly and at minimal cost.

Engineers and scientists use LabView to interface with real-world signals, analyse data for meaningful information and share results and applications.

LabView is available on Windows, Macintosh, Sun Solaris and Linux operating systems.

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