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Problem:   To inspect hydro-formed tubes and compare them to the nominal design intent (CAD geometry). The customer requested that a best-fit alignment be used to associate the measured data to the nominal CAD geometry.

Process:   The hydro-formed tubes were measured using a ‘line’ laser scanning machine. This allowed for full part surface definition totaling close to 2,000,000 data points on each part initially. The tubes were digitized from a number of different orientations which were all later associated together into the same coordinate system.

Solution:   Each scanned hydro-formed tube was thoroughly scanned, and overlaid with the nominal CAD data. A comparison between the measured data and the nominal design intent (CAD) was performed, resulting in ‘color map deviation charts’. These charts are delivered in .JPG, and .BMP formats which can be viewed or printed on any typical PC computer system.