Determination of the single point uncertainty of customized polymer gear wheels using structured-light scanning with various polygonization settings

Abstract

During the manufacturing of work pieces, geometrical deviations from the intended nominal geometry of the designer are inevitable. The procedure of conformance testing defined in ISO 14253-1:2018-07 is used to ensure the function of a work piece by verifying the geometrical compliance with pre-defined tolerance specifications. Depending on the measurement setup used for the validation step, it is possible that the local measurement uncertainty is too large in order to provide a meaningful conformance evaluation. This paper aims to demonstrate the complete workflow of the determination of the locally defined single point uncertainty and its components (systematic and random measurement error, respectively) for a given measurement task. It was shown for an optical measurement setup in combination with an industrial X-ray computed tomography reference measurement system that different necessary colouring methods of polymer (POM) gear wheels, which are required to enable measurements using structured-light scanning, have a measurable influence on the local distribution of the measurement uncertainty. Because of the fact that the presented method is dependent on a discrete surface sampling, the effects of different polygonization settings during the creation of the areal measurement result were evaluated in order to rate the reduced data complexity against the hereby possibly increased measurement uncertainty. The gained information regarding the local measurement uncertainty of a measurement setup can then be used for downstream processes in various use cases, e.g. for the improvement of holistic tolerance simulation models or the improvement of geometrical measurements using weighted regression analysis. Additionally, the visualization of the areal distribution of the measurement uncertainty enables a powerful tool to optimize the used measurement setup.