Quality control enhancement via nondestructive testing for green ceramic tiles

Abstract

Quality control in ceramic tile manufacturing is hard, labor intensive and it is performed in a harsh industrial environment with noise, extreme temperature and humidity. It can be divided into color analysis, dimension verification, and surface defect detection which is the main purpose of our research. Defects detection is still based on the judgment of human operators while most of the other manufacturing activities are automated so, our work is a quality control enhancement by implementing a nondestructive testing for the green ceramic tiles using noncontact ultrasonic sensors enables on-line process control, which is a test configuration for the green ceramic tiles. Ultrasonic testing is extensively utilized for integrity verification of composite materials. The design presented here in the research is a low cost on-line measurement system using noncontact ultrasonic transducer based on the time of flight diffraction (TOFD) technique, which is one of the nondestructive testing techniques. TOFD is rapidly gaining importance as a powerful stand alone inspection technique that can simultaneously detect and size defect. This paper, presents the results of an experimental investigation for a nondestructive test on real green ceramic tiles including manufacturing defects which will be reported in the research.