The Automobile Corporation

The Challenge

Your automotive company faces a challenge. Global competition is intensifying, quality demands are rising, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to implement legal requirements cost-efficiently. As an automobile manufacturer, strict cost control is essential for ensuring your profitability and competitiveness.

Recently, the reject rate of your steel shafts during straightening is higher than expected. This negatively affects your cost efficiency and thus profitability of your production process. You must react quickly and effectively to resolve the problem.

You set up a “crack-free production” task force and contact the QASS GmbH. QASS is an innovative manufacturer of structure-borne sound based and micromagnetic measuring systems. When it comes to crack detection during bending and straightening processes, they are the world market leader. QASS has the expertise and technology to provide a durable solution to your problem.

5 Steps to a Crack-Free Production

The Facts

Steel shafts must be straightened after hardening in order to rule out concentricity errors. The reject rate during straightening is very high compared to other production steps, which results in considerable costs for automobile manufacturers and their suppliers. As a pioneer in crack prevention, QASS can help you avoid these issues with the high-end measuring system Optimizer4D.

Preventing crack formation in steel shafts is complicated by production and material conditions that could cause cracks during straightening. In addition, cracks that occur in the moment of straightening can close again on the surface as soon as the pressure exerted by the pressure punch decreases. These crack formations inside the component are difficult to detect with methods such as the dye penetrant method or fluxing, and destructive testing methods render the steel shaft unusable. With the QASS Optimizer4D measuring system you can inspect your components in-process, in real-time and non-destructively.

The Cost Concerns

Investing in the prevention of crack formation during straightening is reasonable and economically expedient:

Optimizer4D creates the prerequisites for a crack-free straightening process by eliminating superfluous costs for pseudo rejects. Further measures to optimize the process and straightening strategy can cut costs and perfectly coordinate machine run-time and cycle length.

The QASS Strategy

With the Optimizer4D from QASS, you will benefit from the most cutting-edge measurement technology to monitor your straightening process: non-destructive, in-process and ready for optimization. Pattern recognition and learning ability allow us to effectively avoid cracking and scrap during straightening.

Step 1: Upgrade

Implementing QASS pattern recognition systems: The pioneering and intelligent QASS software offers you significantly improved selectivity in crack detection – a fundamental prerequisite for targeting a 0 % reject rate.

Result: A significantly lower reject rate due to the significant reduction of pseudo cracks.

Step 2: Training

Your Optimizer4D learns the typical signals that occur when straightening your components. Thus, even very special acoustic emissions can be clearly distinguished from cracks according to their classification.

Result: You have achieved an even lower crack rate because the measuring system precisely detects pseudo rejects.

Step 3: Expertise

With QASS, you will benefit from our many years of experience in monitoring and optimizing straightening processes as well as our close cooperation with straightening machine manufacturers. We support you in adapting your straightening strategy to avoid the development of real cracks in your components.

Result: A renewed reduction of the crack rate by optimizing your straightening strategy.

Step 4: Automation

QASS intelligent software is able to apply everything it learns about your straightening process to a fully automated monitoring system, making adaptive reactions to process fluctuations as well as predictive crack warnings possible. Production information, which is available online, can be correlated with QASS data for optimization purposes.

Result: Achieve a nearly 0% crack rate thanks to automated crack prevention.

Step 5: Care

Continuous optimization is our mission. QASS-Care helps maintain the improvement made to production and quality. By providing remote assistance, constantly innovating our measuring technology and developing our AI software, we ensure virtually crack-free straightening even with increasingly complex components and materials.

Result: Mission accomplished – With a crack rate of practically 0 %, crack-free production is reality.

Benefits for Manufacturers

Minimize pseudo rejects

Adaptive frequency filters and real-time pattern recognition suppress process noise.

Crack prevention

Reduction of scrap by optimizing the straightening strategy.

Increased component safety

Frequency-selective crack detection and application of search patterns find crack formations that were previously undetectable.

Process optimization

Detect various other component defects and optimize machine settings to improve quality.

So far, cracked shafts are unavoidable during straightening. QASS changes that.

The QASS Crack Avoidance Technology

Electronic Signal Filtering via Frequency Masks

Frequency masks enable you to use the Optimizer4D in industrial processes, where conditions could otherwise strongly impair the measurement. These impairments are mainly due to electrical fields and interference currents but can also represent other parasitic acoustic signals such as constant ambient noise (e.g. fans, servomotors or other machine vibrations). The frequency mask thus significantly improves the signal-to-noise ratio. During application, the portion of the signal that cannot be used for the measurement is identified – usually this is a combination of interference signals. With a few clicks, a mask is created that simulates the frequency-amplitude distribution at the current time zero point (time axis, smallest value) and a defined range is then automatically subtracted from the remaining signal. This can be replicated with new signal data recordings. Different names can be assigned to the frequency masks, which allows you to store numerous frequency masks and apply them to the generated data streams.

Operators network

The QASS operators network is a graphical programming environment for the analysis of measurement data. Every aspect of the analysis is visually represented by so-called operators. The visual representation enables the connection of hardware and the representation of complex data analysis. The operators are programmed using the qt program library, based on the C++ high-level language. This enables the integration of customer-specific analysis operators. The measuring device then provides the data streams from the sensor signal, the customer programs the analysis himself and inserts his operator. This procedure enables a high degree of flexibility in signal analysis, integration of additional sensors, cascading sequence of complex relationships and integration of measurement technology into the IOT.

Pattern Recognition

Pattern recognition uses the operators network and is its core function. Various existing operators are linked to each other simply by dragging and dropping. At the beginning is the sensor signal (stream buffer), which comes directly from the HFIM as a transformed signal. The sensor signal is linked to a comparison operator that searches for patterns in this incoming live sensor signal. The patterns are provided by a pattern database (“pattern provider”). The patterns are sensor signals to which a referenced state has been assigned. The pattern is taken directly from the three-dimensional spectral data diagram and stored automatically at known process limits or manually at the initial setup. The pattern is searched in the “Significance Comparer” for its shape, amplitude scaling and time scaling in the sensor signal and compared with the reference condition. A “Similarity Factor” is determined from the comparison with the reference. Of course, different patterns can be searched for in parallel. After the comparison operator, it is decided what is to be done with the result. Various further data analyses, complex and cascading transmission to other networks, signal messages to the machine or communication modules are already available.

The digitization of production processes places high demands on the measurement technology of the future. Measuring instruments no longer have to communicate with the machine alone, but with central systems. Process anomalies are then reported to local employees on the smartphone or tablet. The central server with the measuring device is the dispatcher, the worker executes. The measuring device also independently determines whether and when a process anomaly has occurred, even if the detected condition does not resemble any pattern or reference. Operators are also available for this purpose.

HFIM

If a component cracks, it emits a characteristic signal. With the structure-borne sound analysis method HFIM (High-Frequency-Impulse-Measurement) the most selective crack detection is achieved.

More about HFIM

The Product

Optimizer4D is a measuring computer for an automatic detection of cracks that can occur during bending processes in workpieces. The system not only detects cracks at the moment they appear, it also minimizes (pseudo-)rejects and even avoids cracks.

More about the Product

Crack Detection

Crack detection is a prerequisite for crack avoidance. QASS is the world market leader in crack detection for straightening gear shafts.

More about Crack Detection

QASS - Your Technology Partner

QASS has almost twenty years of experience in process optimization, sensor technology, component monitoring and quality assurance. Our measurement technology with intelligent pattern recognition software enables almost 100 % crack prevention in straightening processes.

Our constant efforts to develop better solutions build the basis for our expertise. Projects conducted with renowned universities, research institutions and companies complement our development work. We apply this know-how directly to our work on customer projects. Automotive companies and suppliers worldwide rely on our expertise in crack prevention, process optimization and quality assurance. Continuously working to develop and improve our products ensures that the monitoring of your straightening process is state-of-the-art. With the help of the Optimizer4D, you not only detect cracks with the utmost precision, but can prevent them from occurring. Our technology and services sustainably reduce the risk of steel shaft failure and guarantee an optimal straightening process.

At QASS, we love what we do. Fundamental to our philosophy is the constant quest for better results and more efficient methods. Come see for yourself what our competence and passion for technology and innovation can do for your company.