Eaton saves over $90k in 12 months with Lumafield inspection solutions
Power management company Eaton has saved over 90,000 USD in 12 months after bringing part inspection in-house.
Working with Lumafield, the manufacturer has reduced inspection time from weeks to hours.
Eaton is the supplier of electrical, hydraulic and mechanical energy systems, with the company hoping to lead the way in making such products more reliable, efficient, safe and sustainable. To that end, Eaton is implementing novel engineering work, and is looking to enhance product and process efficiencies wherever it can.
In doing so, the company has aligned itself with Lumafield, adding the supplier’s microfocus CT and Triton systems to its toolkit. With this high-resolution component analysis and in-line inspection capability, Eaton has been able to quickly resolve issues which, for example, affect multi-thousand vehicle assembly runs.
One scenario saw Eaton discover a fault with a truck valve housing component. Using Lumafield’s Neptune X-ray CT scanner, Eaton Mechanical Engineer Kirstyn Hein identified a ‘subtle imperfection’ in material mixture, with the company then able to isolate the density differentials that were causing the part to break with Lumafield’s AI-powered Voyager 3D analysis software. After identifying the affected batches, Eaton was able to release the majority of trucks that same day.
“With Lumafield’s CT scanner and software, the entire part can be inspected in much greater detail, reducing inspection time from 3-6 days to just 3 hours while keeping the product intact,” Hein said.
Inside Eaton’s Vehicle Group – a tier 1 automotive supplier – the company is using Lumafield’s inspection offering to inspect products ranging from intricate micro-electrical components to robust hydraulics systems, which frequently include complex matings of headers and terminals in electrical connectors. Assessing these components with conventional methods might take up to four days, but Eaton is said to have inspected the parts eight times faster with Lumafield technology. The manufacturer is also said to be enjoying access to rich data which allows for detailed analyses of internal structures and external features, with this ‘comprehensive view’ deemed to be ‘invaluable’ for defect identification, assembly verification and root cause analysis.
Joining forces with the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft applied research organisation, Eaton’s Industrial Controls and Protection Division (ICPD) is leveraging Lumafield’s Analysis Recipes tool to automate the measurement of internal porosity in
injection-moulded and 3D printed automotive parts like fuel caps. By swiftly detecting, quantifying and visualising deviations above a customised threshold, analysis time is said to be accelerated by 4-6x.
“With Lumafield, we get a fast reconstruction that shows porosity without slicing, potting or using calipers, and we can instantly see the problem,” Hein said.
Eaton also recently faced the challenge of producing a complex polymer part in-house, made more difficult by the absence of an original CAD file. 3D optical scanners proved inadequate because they could not capture the full geometry of the part’s intricate internal passageways. Eaton deployed Lumafield’s CT platform to penetrate the entire volume of the part, allowing for the accurate capture of internal geometry and features hidden by overhangs and crevices – details essential for the part’s functionality and manufacturability. Voyager then allowed Eaton to mesh export to CAD software, where the design could be refined and produced in-house.
With multiple successes across the Eaton business and a Lumafield Solutions Engineer nearby, the company is now set to deepen its relationship with Lumafield. Eaton will add a High Resolution Neptune, which has been designed to ‘crisply capture fine features’ and is suitable for the inspection of electronic components, while a high throughput Triton system will also be integrated.
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