Characteristic inspection of sheet metal parts for manufacturing applications

Inspection of parts is a requirement to assure quality and to reduce manufacturing costs and rework. This paper presents an inspection system of characteristic of sheet metal parts with large and complicated curved surfaces used widely for manufacturing applications. Sheet metal parts with large and complicated curved surfaces are distorting easily, loading and unloading difficultly. It is very difficult and inefficient to measure and evaluate accurately the parts because the measuring benchmark is not conformed to the processing benchmark after reloading. Taking measurement of the parts as a purpose, a new measurement method called On-Line Measurement System (OLMS) is put forward based on the principle of linkage between the manufacturing equipment and Coordinate Measurement Machine (CMM), in which the manufacturing equipment is equipped by CMM, the parts are measured on-line after being machined. The parts are evaluated on-line via the techniques such as curves matching and error separating. The measuring efficiency is advanced by avoiding the parts being unloaded and reloaded, and the measurement precision is enhanced without the error come from the parts´ reloading for measuring. The successful development of the measure system verifies the feasibility of the thought introduced. The successful application of it proves that the method is effective, credible and accurate.