Technology foundation ensures quality with ROMER Absolute Arm

Industry in the north-western Spanish province of Asturias has a public source of knowledge at its disposal. To keep the region competitive, the foundation-owned private company PRODINTEC (www.prodintec.com) consults local businesses in novel design, management and manufacturing means. A ROMER Absolute Arm with integrated laser scanner is the quality guarantor in a highly inventive environment

The mission: wherever Asturian industry intends to improve products or manufacturing and management processes, PRODINTEC stands by to technologically support the transition. With the objective of moving the local industry forward, the PRODINTEC team explores new methods and keeps the knowledge transferred to their customers up to date. Rapid manufacturing and automation are some of PRODINTEC’s work fields, and professional metrology is their key to successful industrial consulting.

A different application in every room

“We were looking for a portable metrology tool in addition to our stationary CMM”, says Jesús Marrón Fernández, Quality Responsible at PRODINTEC. “Basically, we have a different application for a mobile CMM in every room.” After evaluating several options, the team around Jesús Marrón defined a portable measuring arm as best solution for their multitude of measurement tasks. They chose a ROMER Absolute Arm with integrated laser scanner as universal metrology tool for both tactile and non-contact measurement.

Rough conditions, robust tool

The ROMER Absolute Arm is in daily use at PRODINTEC. Additive manufacturing (AM) is one of the advanced technology fields Jesús Marrón’s team works on, and the ROMER arm has become an indispensable co-operator for the alignment of a laser sintering machine using the touch probe. Another main application for the measuring arm requires robustness: Inspecting precision parts on a micro milling machine means using a precision instrument with laser scanner under rough conditions. Thanks to carbon fibre tubes and a completely integrated and protected scanner, potentially disturbing factors do not influence the ROMER Absolute Arm.

All-rounder wanted

All either rapidly or conventionally manufactured prototypes undergo a measurement process at PRODINTEC. Jesús Marrón and his colleague David Cereijo carry out both comparison against CAD data or reverse engineering of prototypes. The ROMER Absolute Arm helps them to digitally analyze work pieces made of many different materials and in a whole variety of shapes. The arm’s ability to change from probing to scanning any time and the adjustment capabilities of the scanner for all types of materials and surfaces enable the handling of objects such as turbine blades, architecture models, sheet metal or plastic parts, no matter if they’re flat, full of features, domed or even more complex.

Taken a shine to laser scanning

“In the beginning, we planned to use the portable CMM mainly for probing and some scanning tasks. But after a while, we discovered how scanning adds better measurement data and thus more value to our measurements. In our everyday business, we are now up to 70% scanning applications for the arm. We see even more potential in the arm’s mobility and will use it in the future to measure directly in our customers’ facilities”, recaps Jesús Marrón.