Towards a New Concept of In-Line Crankshaft Balancing by Contact Less Measurement: Process for Selecting the Best Digitizing System

Controlling the part’s balance of crankshafts are important issues for automotive manufacturers. Unbalance measurement is usually carried out using high-precision mechanical machines. The main objective of the present work is to replace mechanical measuring systems by a non-contact digitizing system, which permits the acquisition of the crankshaft surface. As the geometry to be measured presents a large variety of shapes and textures with accessibility issues, the definition of the best-suited scanning system related to geometrical and industrial constraints is a major issue.In this direction, the paper deals with the definition of a protocol based on quality indicators associated to the collected data to compare various digitizing systems. Those quality indicators are assessed thanks to simple artifacts measurement according to a specific procedure. The comparison protocol is applied to evaluate three triangulation based digitizing systems: Results allow us to identify well-adapted digitizing systems in relation to crankshaft balancing requirements.© 2012 ASME