Improvement of performances of an optical system for defectiveness survey in a company of the automotive field

Laminated safety glass is widely used in the automotive field, while the demand of tempered glass is quickly increasing. Glass production is characterized by several phases with grate temperature ranges. Along the productive process, the car windshields are subject to scratches, abrasions, chippings, contaminations, inclusions, impurities, pond points and bubbles. For example, pond points can be found on the glass plate before starting the productive process, due to unqualified suppliers; instead other defects can appear later during production activities. In the tempered glass production, particular furnaces are used for the bending and the tempering, so each product has to be tested at the furnace exit, in order to control the thermal and temporal parameters of the bending process. The control of the optical quality of the glass production, can be realized by automatic systems of inspection. In the last years, the above control systems have become more and more fast, reliable, exact and cheap; so they can be easily used for the quality control in the glass production. Safeglass® is an automatic system of vision able to check anomalies and remove defective components from the productive line. The above system is able to “see” different kinds of defects: pond points (size from 0,5 mm), contaminations and inclusions (size from 0,4 mm). Thanks to that system, it is possible to save production costs, discarding defective glasses at the beginning of the process, before other activities are realized with consequently cost increase; moreover, by studying the kind of defects, we can identify where the process is out of control. The Safeglass® system can be easily installed in a standard productive line.