Vision Aided Monitoring and Control System for Ceramic and Powder Metallurgy Manufacturing

The objective of this program is to develop non-contact vision sensing and processing schemes that can be used for ceramic and powder metallurgy process monitoring and control. Proposed applications include monitoring of overall shrinkage or differential shrinkage rates during drying of slurries, monitoring dimensional changes,shrinkage and control to final dimensions during sintering, and detecting defects and inhomogeneities before sintering. Phase I tasks will mainly include: a review of previous work particularly in ceramic and powder metallurgy process monitoring and control; an analysis of application requirements including options for interfacing with an intelligent design and processing system; an investigation and limited prototyping of required vision sensing and processing approaches. This will include both prototyping of inspection and precision gauging approaches for dimensional checking and an exploratory analysis of methods for producing optimal images under ceramic processing conditions and techniques for the measurement of local in-plane surface strains. The Phase I prototyping will be performed on state-of-the-art vision systems implemented on standard computer platforms. Limited demonstrations will be performed with simulated sintering operations in room temperature. On the basis of the Phase I results, need for future R&D will be identified and the Phase II effort will be planned.