Precision sensor manufacturer Micro-Epsilon has launched an affordable and compact thickness measurement system for strip, plate and film targets.
The fully assembled system is immediately ready for use ‘out of the box’ and costs less than £10,000!
The measurement system is designed to bridge the gap between customers’ own self-build solutions and the high cost, large investment thickness measurement systems that involve commissioning by the supplier’s own engineers.
The new thicknessSENSOR is a complete solution aimed at customers who require a simple, high accuracy, compact thickness measurement system that is fully assembled, ready to use and affordable.
The fully assembled system comprises of a stable C-frame onto which two laser triangulation sensors are mounted. These sensors measure the thickness of strip, plate and film material such as plastics, metals, composites and fabrics. The compact controller integrated into the frame calculates thickness values and outputs these via analogue or digital (Ethernet, USB) interfaces.
Chris Jones, Managing Director at Micro-Epsilon UK comments: “There are many requirements for inline thickness measurement which cannot justify the cost of a turnkey measurement system, yet still require high accuracy. This has resulted in companies having to self-build a thickness measurement solution from a pair of sensors, mechanical framework and software processing units such as PLCs or PCs. Once the system is finally built, it is then another matter to determine the system accuracy. However, with the launch of thicknessSENSOR, all this effort and expense is removed. The solution comes fully assembled, ready to use and costs less than ten thousand pounds. All components on the thicknessSENSOR work in perfect harmony and a measurement accuracy of less than 10µm is guaranteed.”
Due to its extremely compact design (410mm x 140mm x 70mm) the thicknessSENSOR can be installed in confined spaces. Using a calibration target, the two laser triangulation sensors can be calibrated at any time. The two sensors are from Micro-Epsilon’s award-winning optoNCDT 1420 range of laser triangulation sensors.
The thicknessSENSOR system is operated using an intuitive web interface. Different configuration and set ups for specific measurement tasks can be selected using predefined settings, which means the system can be easily and quickly adapted to a range of different measurement applications. Up to eight user-specific sensor settings can be stored and exported in the setup management. Video signal display, signal peak selection and freely adjustable signal averaging enable experienced users to optimise the system for specific measurement tasks. A region of interest (ROI) function allows background signal noise to be filtered out.
The thicknessSENSOR system has a measuring range of 10mm, a measuring width of up to 200mm, at a measuring rate of up to 4kHz. Linearity (combined) is +/- 10µm and temperature stability of the system is <3µm/°C.
If the measurement performance of thicknessSENSOR is not sufficient for some customers, Micro-Epsilon’s Systems division can offer other non-contact thickness measurement systems with temperature-compensated frames that enable even higher precision, stable thickness measurements.
