Leeds-based FTL Technology (
www.ftl.technology) is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of precision-engineered seal solutions; as well as offering a consultancy, design and manufacturing service, the company sells a wide range of products from many of the world’s leading seal manufacturers.
Its customers come from a wide variety of industry sectors, including food and pharma-ceuticals (for which it holds all the necessary accreditations), as well as oil and gas.
Seals for the latter have to withstand extremes of temperature and pressure and be resistant to intense chemical aggression, while also ensuring operator safety and equipment reliability.
To help guarantee the quality of FTL Technology’s sealing products, quality manager Joanne Kite recently investigated a number of high-accuracy optical measuring systems that would enhance the company’s inspection functions.
She subsequently bought a Quick Image 2-D vision measuring system from Andover-based Mitutoyo UK Lt (
www.mitutoyo.co.uk).
Ms Kite said: “FTL Technology’s core strengths are problem solving and helping our customers optimise their processes with premium-quality custom sealing solutions.
"The non-contact vision measuring system from Mitutoyo UK is now fully operational and is being used for a variety of measuring routines, including first-article inspection and checking a percentage of products during a production run; and because many of our products comprise multiple elements assembled into a single seal with difficult-to-access features, we also slice though some of our seals to allow the Quick Image machine to accurately inspect their cross-sections.
“Moreover, because the Quick Image offers excellent magnification capabilities, we also use it to enlarge the images of components, thereby ensuring that we can pick up even the most microscopic of imperfections.
"Given that many companies require traceable documentation, we now print product images and detailed inspection reports direct from the Quick Image and supply them to our customers; and because conventional measurement techniques such as calipers, micrometers and CMMs with touch probes would distort some of the deformable materials used in our seal products, the non-contact operation of our Mitutoyo machine means it is an ideal measuring system.”
Mitutoyo vision measuring systems are available in a wide range of sizes and accuracy classes to cover most precision 2-D and 21/2-D measuring applications; and in addition to high-performance vision capabilities, contact probes are available on some systems to further extend their range of measurement applications.
The latest version of Mitutoyo’s Quick Image series 2-D vision measuring system, as purchased by FTL Technology, is available with 0.2x or 0.5x magnification (telecentric optical system), making it suitable for applications that require distortion-free imaging with accurate non-contact measurement capabilities.
The telecentric lens gives the user a field of view and depth of focus that make the measurement of workpieces with multiple step heights both fast and precise, while a ‘one click’ function allows “measurement and tolerance judgment” with the click of a mouse.
This allows the automatic detection of a workpiece’s position and inclination; it also “aids the efficient measurement of multiple workpieces that share the same shape”. A maximum of 1,000 parts can be measured in a single measuring routine.
The Quick Image also features high-luminance built-in LED lighting and a premium-quality 3-megapixel colour camera. Furthermore, the measured results are displayed in real time on the system’s video image screen, allowing tolerance limits to be clearly seen at a glance.