Vision measures diesel engine injectors

In the automotive market, dimensional problems during production of diesel engine injectors may cause problems in engine performance or fuel consumption. During production, injectors pass through several shaping operations before reaching the burr removal station, which is the last phase before packaging.

Traditionally, the injectors are manually inspected by operators, which is not cost effective and is subject to human error. Consequently, an industrial vision system was developed by Vistek (Istanbul, Turkey; www.vistekas.com) for Bosch Sanayi ve Ticaret to automate dimensional measurements with 50-µm precision. The burr removal station was the most suitable point to install the vision system and execute dimensional controls. Since the dimensional control operations are performed concurrently with the burr removal process, the system does not require additional time in the production cycle.

To achieve the desired precision of nine height and diameter measurements, the injectors are divided into eight subsections. The system captures one image for each section with a high-resolution camera from IDS (Obersulm, Germany; www.ids-imaging.de) and then performs image processing separately. The camera is mounted on a vertically moving platform to image different sections of each injector. The vision software was developed using the Halcon interactive development environment (IDE) HDevelop from MVTec Software (Munich, Germany; www.mvtec.com). Total inspection time for each injector is 7–9 s. A more complete system description is available on the Vision Systems Design web site.