| Steel Billet Defect Detection | ||
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Requirement To identify and locate defects in steel billets (up to 9 meters long, moving at up to 1 meter/sec) at a steel mill, output position information to a marking system, and to generate batch test reports. | ||
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Solution The steel billet passes through a high power induction heater that heats the surface of the billet. Four Flir SC3000 Infra-red cameras acquire images of the four sides of the heated billet at a rate of 50 images/second, that are acquired by four National Instruments digital image acquisition cards, plugged into four 'Camera' computers. The computers run software developed by Westplex, using LabVIEWTM and Imaq VisionTM. The images are joined to form a single image of the whole billet, and are analyzed by high-level optimized image analysis algorithms that extract the position and size of each defect according to the inspection specifications relevant to each batch of billets. A fifth 'Operator Interface' computer communicates with the plant PLC, the 'Camera' computers and an external data-base, The 'Operator Interface' computer receives new batch information from the operator or the plant PLC, sends inspection specifications to the 'Camera' computers, receives defect location information from the 'Camera' computers, analyzes the results, transmits defect sizes and locations to the plant PLC, generates inspection reports and updates the external data-base. The 'Operator Interface' computer also displays live images from the cameras via a Matrox Cronos analogue frame grabber. |
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