"The SES of MSG decides without a doubt and helps us eliminate unwanted surface defects, reducing scrap rates by 2-digit percentages!"

As part of a research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (BMWK) for defect detection on material surfaces, we have once again brought an idea to product maturity. Thanks to the support of our customer specializing in horizontal casting of aluminum bars, the system was tested, validated and fully integrated in industrial-scale production environments within 2 years.

In the casting process, due to a large number of casting parameters, the material surface can be influenced intentionally, but also unintentionally. In the worst case, critical structures on the material surface (e.g. spalling, roughness or the smallest holes) can be incorporated in downstream forging processes and lead to invisible predetermined breaking points in safety-relevant components.

The result is our Surface Evaluation System SES. "The impressive high-resolution photography of the material surface of the MSG principle makes it possible to visualize the finest 3D structures," says Frank Vieweg. "The system actually manages to meet the human decision criteria for evaluating surface defects with 90% accuracy through its 3D analysis!".

In contrast to the laser-based profile cutting technology established on the market, which only theoretically lines up the individually successively recorded cut profiles to form a 3D surface (pseudo-3D), the SES microscopes the surface for even the finest roughnesses. 

In addition to reliably rejecting defects, our customer was able to significantly improve its manufacturing quality by innovatively integrating the detection results of the SES - fewer defects, fewer manufacturing problems, lower costs.