Engineers at Siam Riso Wood Products (Sarattani, Thailand) have developed an automated vision system that can monitor the quality of particle board using smart cameras from National Instruments Thailand (Bangkok, Thailand).
The company itself manufactures 10,000 particle boards per day and until the deployment of the NI based vision system, these were inspected manually.
Together with support from engineers at NI Thailand, engineers led by Sarapong Kaney at Siam Riso modified an existing particle board manufacturing from Kvaerner Panel Systems (Hannover, Germany) that was not equipped with machine vision technology.
To do so, they retrofitted the machine with three NI 1762 smart cameras each of which captures three separate areas of the particle board after the surfaces have been polished in the final stages of manufacturing.
The three cameras -- which perform defect detection in parallel -- are interfaced to an S7 PLC from Siemens. If a defect is detected on a particle board by any of the cameras, the PLC is instructed to actuate a sorting mechanism to separate it from the good products.
The system is also able to display the lot number and the percentage yield of good and rejected products to an operator through a man-machine interface.
Developed in three months, the system is now running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. More information is available here.
Related articles on wood inspection vision systems that you might also find of interest.
1. Automation speeds sawmill inspection
Working with a team of vision-algorithm designers led by Olli Silven of the Information Processing Laboratory at the University of Oulu in Finland, vision-system integrator inX Systems designed the OptiGrader lumber-grading and optimization machine-vision system for international lumber-products producer UPM.
2. Camera Link extenders aid in timber inspection
Lisker Oy (Vaaksy, Finland; www.lisker.fi) has developed a grading system for sawn timber, known as ProfiGrade, that is suitable for both dried and undried timber.
3. System detects faults in wood-wool slabs
A system based on off-the-shelf lighting, cameras, and machine-vision systems has been developed at the Carinthia Technical Institute (Villach, Austria) to inspect wood-wool slabs.
-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
