The critical role played by optical components has ensured that manufacturers who have gained a reputation for innovation and for the delivery of premium quality products have enjoyed great success in this expanding sector. One such company is Poole based Crystran Ltd.
Crystran is a globally renowned optical engineering company that specialises in fabricating components from exotic materials including crystal and innovative glasses that are used for their transmission properties, and from which Crystran derives its name.
As a manufacturer of high quality optical components / optical flats, Crystran boasts a wealth of experience and is a renowned innovator in its chosen field. Previously, as part of a large international chemical concern, the company accrued more than 200 cumulative years of working with specialised optical materials. This collective experience and in-depth expertise ensured the early success of the company when it began trading under its own ownership in December 1993.
Crystran is accredited to ISO9001:2008 and administers a stringent quality control regime. In addition to the thorough inspection of all of the raw materials that are bought into the company, Crystran’s impressive QA department ensures the compliance of and the adherence to specification of all products.
The application of the latest inspection techniques and regular investments in state-of-the-art quality control equipment means that Crystran is constantly pushing forward the boundaries of what can be tested. This meticulous, systematic approach not only guarantees the quality of its products, it drives forward the company’s production capabilities and allows ever higher specification optics to be developed.
In order to remain at the cutting-edge of inspection technology, in accordance with the company’s continuous improvement policy, Crystran recently invested in an advanced Optical 3D Co-ordinate Measuring System from Baty international.
Kevin Wright, Crystran Quality & Environment Manager explained:
“As we have a technically demanding global customer base, ranging from major international manufacturers of analytical and control instrumentation, through major aerospace companies and space agencies, to research establishments and leading Universities worldwide, quality is of paramount importance to us.
In addition to purchasing the best available production equipment, we also make regular investments in the most up- to -date inspection tools. As our workload is continuously increasing, we recently researched the available measuring technology that could adhere to our demanding precision needs and speed-up throughput in our QA department.
“Having carefully considered several manufacturers products, we purchased a Venture CNC Optical Measuring System from Baty International. Through our daily involvement in advanced optical systems, we instantly recognised the quality of Baty’s offering.
In addition to proving the high accuracy that we need, the Venture’s CNC operation means that we can now quickly recall a pre-written program and undertake a measuring routine on multiple parts in a fully automatic mode. The Venture also automatically generates comprehensive inspection reports therefore we are able to supply our customers with all-inclusive certification.
As we received excellent in-house training and given that the Venture’s controls and software are very intuitive, our conversion from our previously used methods has been relatively seamless. As well as helping to raise our accuracy capability, the CNC nature of our new Baty machine has significantly speeded-up the throughput of our busy QA department.”
Based in Burgess Hill, West Sussex, Baty International is one of the world's leading manufacturers of Optical Profile Projectors and Co-ordinate Measuring Systems. As a leading innovator in the field of non contact dimensional measurement, Baty has offered premium quality camera- based vision measuring systems since the early 1980s.
Baty’s highly precise, 3 axis Venture range includes both manual and CNC systems. The use of Fusion software means that Venture CNC models are able to completely automate 3D inspection processes and accurately undertake tasks such as scanning and ‘best-fit’ extremely quickly. Venture uses a ‘teach and repeat process’, by simply measuring a part, a full CNC program is created automatically. The machine’s zoom lens can also be controlled so that all magnification changes are recorded into the created program.
Increasing the Venture’s flexibility, measurements from data points taken using a touch probe can be combined with those taken using video edge detection, resulting in reduced inspection times. Venture can be supplied with a changer rack so that probe modules, fitted with a variety of pre-calibrated styli, can also be used in the same inspection routine. When a change of stylus is required, the system automatically returns the previously used probe module to the rack, thenand then picks up the next probe module to continue the inspection process.
In addition to a graphical representation of the measured part, detailed reports can be created, showing the feature name, nominal dimension, actual, error, upper and lower limits and a green pass or red fail label for each measured dimension. Geometric tolerance details can also be displayed along with thumbnail views of parts and batch/customer information. If required, the entire report can be duplicated as an Excel workbook for email.