BST Eltromat brings advanced QA to TTE 2018

Bielefeld, Germany – At the 2018 Tire Technology Expo, BST Eltromat International will focus on the challenges of obtaining high-precision length and angle measurements in tire manufacturing as well as quality assurance in areas such as a web-width.

Features will include the company's visualisation and operating platform ‘PROSolutions’, which links different quality assurance systems, and a new system for measuring the thickness of materials.

The platform is said to enable customers to link numerous monitoring and measurement stations and provide a unified user-interface for visualising, configuring and controlling the systems.

According to the company, PROSolutions shows detailed, three-dimensional images of the integrated monitoring and measurement systems. This, it says, gives machine operators an overview that enables then to better manage the whole QA system.

"With just one swipe they can switch from the web width measuring system to the web guiding system on the belt server, for instance, or to a sensor," said BST Eltromat. "They can then access the details and can use the touch screen to quickly parameterize the sensors, for example, or to make specialized changes according to the application needs to the camera settings."

Also on show at TTE will be a system for measuring thickness in rubber and tire production that can be integrated into the production process, configured and operated via the new visualisation and operating platform.

The system is said to be modular and flexible, allowing configurations that range from using two sensors to eight.

The system being presented in Hanover features four CCD CAM 100 line-scan cameras. It has a physical resolution of 3 x 10,000 pixels and an exceptionally high speed of up to 10 kHz, while remaining very easy to operate and configure.

BST eltromat’s length measurement solutions for tire-building machines synchronise cameras with the machine speeds. The set-up is claimed to provide tire makers with measurements that are accurate to within one hundredth of a second, so optimising the way that individual tire components, such as belts, are processed in tire-building machines.

The tire industry is one of the sectors where we are experiencing continuous growth, according to BST Eltromat's Torsten Probst, who has been overseeing the Chinese tire market for nearly 20 years.

"Machine manufacturers in China have been gradually enhancing the quality of their products and they are now exporting globally – which means our quality assurance systems are being exported globally as well,” said Probst.

“Our wide product range gives them the flexibility to meet the diverse technical and economic requirements of their customers," he added.” The machine manufacturers also particularly value the high-level expertise that BST eltromat offers as a system integrator, as well as the way it acts as an automation partner – it enables its customers to engage with Industry 4.0 by processing the quality assurance data that has been captured so that processes can be optimised."