The quality of our products must be ensured all along their life cycle, from development stage to series manufacturing up to their assembling and using into the systems of our customers.
For that reason, our Quality Department is involved at every stages of our products life-cycle.
Quality engineers and technicians take part to the Feasibility Analyses at the earliest steps of projects.
They anticipate failures which may occur on making analogies based on the history of similar products (lessons learned cards) and they implement preventive tools such as FMEA analysis (Failure Mode & Effect Analysis).
They define the specific inspection means that are necessary to inspect the gears.
They define and share with our customers the control plan & measurement methods in order to make our Quality assessment consistent with the one of our customers.
They support also our Tooling Department in inspecting electrodes and toothed elements.
Finally, they bring a valuable support to our manufacturing department in inspecting the parts in mass production.
A 3D measuring machine with a scanning head is used to make the measurement of the analytical characteristics of teeth such as profile, helix, and division errors (Fα, Fβ, Fp ... ) This measurement is made on each teeth flanks and allows us to have a complete overview of the gear Quality.
ITWSmpi has got gear inspection machines dedicated to the measurement of meshing characteristics on two flanks. These specific benches allow us to monitor in mass production the quality of crossed-axes gear-pairs such as bevel gears and worm/wheel gears or parallel-axes gears such as cylindrical gears. These benches are used to measure the variation of center distance between a master gear (a perfect gear made of metal) and the part to be measured, when bothare meshing together in contact over two flanks during a complete revolution of the measured part.This allows us to assess very quickly the quality of the part, through out the measurement of Total combined error (F"i), runout deviation (Fr), radial tooth-to-tooth error (f"i), Testing Radius (Tr),… all these characteristics which could either result in noise or meshing interferences in gear-trains should they do not comply with the defined specifications.
We pay a great attention to the roughness of surfaces which are sliding or in contact each others and especially the roughness of the teeth flanks. This is all the more important that roughness of sliding or contact surfaces may contribute significantly in the noise level generated by an actuator.
We can also carry-out tomography analizes to inspect surfaces, like semi-globoid area for example, so as to check their compliance with the theoretical 3D models.