Crack Prevention

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.