Development of In-Process Measurement of Dimension Error during Wire Drawing

Abstract

The applications of metallic wires are very significant in various industries. The current metallic wires have been produced mostly from an ingot by rolling and drawing processes. Wire drawings are widely applied in the corresponding area reduction processes of bar materials, wire rods and tubular goods. In the tests of the quality of drawn wires, the proposed paper designed a three-probe module to exercise surface defect inspection. The grabbed signals of radial distance variation were transferred into roundness calculation and surface defect detection. An easy method for aligning the center of drawn wire and three-probe is also proposed. This new design is suitable for in-process inspection of wire drawing industry. The measurement error for radius is about 0.011% based on the developed three-probe inspection system, which is much lower than machine vision inspection result and is suitable for industry environment of wire drawing in the production line.