Process Integrated Inspection of Motor Pistons using Computerized Tomography

Abstract

Pistons for combustion motors must meet strongest requirements in terms of material quality and dimensional accuracy to withstand the load inside the combustion chamber. The process integrated inspection of pistons using ultrasonic, eddy current and radiography is therefore state of the art. One drawback of all these methods is the lack of precise defect localisation which results in false rejects. Computerized Tomography (CT) provides a three dimensional characterization of defects and overcomes the above mentioned disadvantage but is established only for sample testing in laboratory. In this contribution we present the realisation of a CT system for process integrated casting inspection by means of combustion motor pistons.We cover the hardware setup as well as the software setup and focus on the reference data comparison which is the key method for process integrated defect detection.