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Automating Quality Control Inspections Within Industry 4.0

By Miguel Saldamando - Ceat Design and Manufacturing Systems
CEO

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By Miguel Saldamando | CEO - Mon, 01/23/2023 - 13:00

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Quality inspection has always been an important component of the manufacturing industry, with defective products being one of the major areas for concern. Although it has been a secondary process for many manufacturers — the feeling is that production always comes first — quality control is present and has a direct impact on the cost of a product. Many people have started to feel that quality control's impact on the top-end cost of a product is worth more than the profit from using cheaper materials in production. Read on to learn about how inspection has changed with industry 4.0 and what this means for the future of quality control.

The quality of a product is inspected during different stages of the manufacturing process. Depending on the product, quality inspection can happen at the raw material stage, during production, or at the final product stage. Many inspection processes are done by sampling, which is when a random sample is taken from a lot and according to the results or quantity of defects found on the sample, we decide whether the lot can be rejected or accepted. Of course, sampling is never 100 percent accurate but, often, it is cheaper and for many products it is acceptable. When the products are function or safety critical is usually when a 100 percent inspection is required to avoid any risk to the final user. Some of the inspections that are done in the industry require that we destroy the part; for example, when we are testing a part by applying  force and measuring at what moment it breaks, or when we need to cut the part to measure the internal characteristics under a microscope; this is exactly where nondestructive testing (NDT) comes into play. The most common nondestructive testing is the visual inspection, but there are other inspection techniques like the Eddy current or ultrasound that allow the manufacturing industry to check every part within their process.

With the advent of industrial automation and what's considered Industry 4.0, it has become necessary to automate inspection processes during manufacturing. However, it has proven difficult to automate every inspection. The NDT testing, however, can be easily automated inside the manufacturing plant. With Industry 4.0, the automation of inspections has boomed and many inspection processes are available in the manufacturing industry. In the steel casting industry, there are ultrasonic tubs to look for internal cracks, X-ray machines to find shrinkage or internal pores, and vision systems that measure dimensional characteristics like diameters, thickness and positions. When there is machining involved, Eddy current or magnetic particle machines are present to look for external cracks. 

One of the issues that we have observed in manufacturing relates to the great deal of data generated by automation.  Trying to manage and analyze all this information is a pressing issue for industrial companies. For example, chroming companies usually have a big group of visual inspectors, but the information generated only relates to how many good and bad parts they separated; nowadays, there are visual inspection systems for glossy parts that save a picture of every inspected area and generate information on how many defects, such as scratches, pinholes, spots, pores, bubbles, grains, or dots, are found. The system will not only report the quantity, but it will also report the position, the exact size and the type of defect and it will take only a couple of seconds per inspected area. The massive amount of information generated is still not very useful — usually it is only a safeguard for companies against potential lawsuits. But if this big data is well managed, it could provide  plenty of information about the manufacturing process. There's still too much unstructured data though and most companies aren’t yet using big data to its potential. But if they did, it would lead quality inspection from being reactive to being proactive.

Automating quality inspections in the manufacturing industry is where the future of  quality control should head, but there is still a long way to go. We must strive to improve the management of the big data generated by the implementation of automated inspection systems and actually use it to improve quality, rather than only accumulating the information as statistics related to the process.

As industries across the globe continue to digitize their operations, automated quality inspection is playing an increasingly important role in ensuring that products meet the required standards. By automating the inspection process, companies are able to reduce costs and improve efficiency while maintaining a high level of quality control.

The future of automated quality inspections looks very promising. With advances in technology, more and more companies are beginning to adopt this type of inspection for their own operations. As the technology continues to evolve, we can expect even more innovative solutions for quality control that will help industries improve their productivity and efficiency.

Photo by:   Miguel Saldamando

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