The machine park at Krones Corporation has expanded with the recently purchased 3D scanner SMARTTECH3D UNIVERSE 5Mpix with automated rotary table.

The specific of Krones case study can be discussed in the example of a bottled beer production line, where the entire technological process is focused on the bottle.

Each project starts with the creation of a bottle prototype to which beer will be poured in this case. Then, a range of equipment is selected for particular applications that will create a unique production line.

Krones engineers, unfortunately, encounter many technological and designer barriers on their design way. Each client wants his packaging to have an original look and high quality. By executing the physical prototypemodel (some times 3d printed) that has been accepted by the client, specialists at a later stage must move it to the digital world to perform the appropriate production forms. Engineers later also need to perform quality control of produced product. That is why Krones has always wanted to find a way to quickly and accurately obtain information about a physical bottle.

In the past, measurements were made by using a manual measurement arm with a laser scanner. However, this process, was very time consuming and made a lot of troubles due to the number of measurements that were needed to be made by operator manually.

After the decision to change the measurement technology Krones began the process of searching new different methods of digitizing the bottles. Krones invited a lot of producers of 3D scanners to make demonstrative measurements of packaging and present the advantages of their technologies.

Among the invited guests was INTO3D – an North American distributor of SMARTTECH 3D scanners.INTO3D engineers made demonstration measurement of several bottles. 3D scanning was carried out on site at the Krones factory. A SMARTTECH3D UNIVERSE 5Mpix scanner was used for all measurements. Krones was looking for the most advantageous option of increasing throughput while reducing the time of work of the operator, and highest accuracy of the obtained 3D models.

Finally Krones choose the SMARTTECH3D scanner. The ease and the speed of the 3D scanning processby SMARTTECH3D scanner (thanks to automatedrotary stage) and the ability to make a virtual crossection at SMARTTECH3D measure software (generating as IGES files), finally led to the conclusion that this is the best product for KRONES.

After the implementation of the 3D scanner in the design process at Krones, the estimated throughput and accuracy doubled, compared to the previous measurement method.

Another aspect in which 3D scanners turned out to be very helpful are the errors on the product made during production. Even a small change in the shape of the bottle is associated with the risk of errors on the production line. Therefore, the decision was made to carry out bottle geometry checks by scanning the sample bottle from each batch. The scanned samples are compared with a CAD model, and thanks to the Geomagic ControlX software, all changes are presented as a color map of deviations. This way, the 3D scanner gained an additional application that previously engineers did not assume.

Quality and competitiveness of the SMARTTECH measurement technology was confirmed in the attached testimonial.

Source:Smarttech 3D

More information:

On Smarttech 3D’s official website