Plastic Sheet Thickness Posted in: AccuProfile 820 Laser Scanner – Tags:

An Acuity customer is using AP820 laser line scanners to be able to measure the thickness of a dark plastic sheet material. The uneven surface profile is used to calculate the overall thickness and make sure the material maintains a minimum thickness requirement. The AP820 is very suited for difficult dark targets with its high dynamic range of the CCD chip in the sensor. Sensors can be synchronized to make sure the measurements are very accurate.

In this application, we have the Acuity AP820 laser line sensor, and this is the dash 60 model. It has a 60 millimeter depth of field. We’re going to look at measuring this black plastic material, and we’re going to demonstrate that we can measure the height of it. It has some little artifacts on it, little nibs on it, and we’re going to show that we can measure those nibs as well.

We place the material on a table with a hole cut in the black plastic material. We place a white ceramic block that is exactly one millimeter tall as a point of reference in our height scan. We’re going to show that we can measure that millimeter step height, which will give us a good proof of concept that we’re measuring the target material. And also, we’re going to go from the shiny white block to a wood surface to then the dark black plastic material, and we’re not going to have any trouble with those features.

As you see in the video, we measure those little artifact nibs really well, we have a couple little spurious reflections, but that can be filtered out pretty easily. As well we add a new measurement. We come in and measure the height. We can do distance or widths or heights or different positioning. We do a quick little calculation using this feature after we’ve calibrated the laser, and then we can see the number we’re getting is about 2.3 millimeter thickness of that material.

Lastly we take a look at the 3d capability of this laser profiler. As we’ll see, we scan across a couple of times to build up some more dense data. And now we click on some static points and we get a really good image of that part. All in all, a nice

video showing a proof of concept on a similar material and the ability of the free AcuityView software program to make the needed accurate measurements.

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Inside Technical Sales and Support at Acuity Laser | Website | + posts

Sarah has been our technical support and sales engineer for 5+ years. If you've ever reached out to Acuity Laser for tech support, more than likely, Sarah is the one who helped you.