As adhesive joining continues to gain importance in the automotive and other industries, manufacturers and operators recognize that adhesive applications require specific inspection.
Bonding with adhesives has become an increasingly popular method to reduce the weight of automotive body panels. In consequence, bond lines in modern car designs can amount to hundreds of meters. Since even the smallest deficiency in the bond can cause corrosion, inspection during the manufacturing process is crucial.
The Bond Scanner from Waygate Technologies allows for fast, easy, reliable, and repeatable testing of bonded parts. It eliminates scrap and with its phased array technology and flexible design, guarantees full coverage of the bond line or seam.
The Bond Scanner is simply clamped on the two body panels joined by a seam bond. The innovative array design enables the array to adapt also to contoured parts as commonly used in automobile designs and covering bond lines up to 32 mm in width.
Since the spring-loaded encoder wheel is located on the other side of the plate combination a firm and stable position of the array can be realized. The specially designed protection foil reduces the needed couplant to a minimum and enables a manual, one-handed scanning. Complete sections of car body bond seams (e.g. on hoods, doors or other mounted parts) can be inspected in just one scan. Knowing if your parts are adequately bonded increases productivity and ensures that product safety and quality standards are met every time.
This solution allows the inspector to evaluate the bond seams’ overall width and identify misaligned bond lines or areas that lack adhesive. The Bond Scanner can be used in all industry sectors where bond lines must be assessed.
This innovative scanner allows for easy inspection of complex geometries that are increasingly found in modern car designs. The convexly pre-bent array design of the LA-10, 32-element flex scanner can be adapted to both concave and convex curvatures, with a bending radius of approximately 80 mm or 3.2” and the ability to inspect the A side-edge bond lines up to 32 mm or 1.3” wide
When even higher resolution is required, the Advanced Bond Scanner isthe perfect solution. With 64 elements and 0.5 mm / 20 mil pitch, it provides the detail that any next-level quality standard might require.
This flexible scanner examines many different bond seam geometries with just one probe. It can be adapted to inspect adhesive bonds with widths varying from 8 to 20 mm or 0.315” to 0.787” of the A and B side-edges. Note: Flat coupling surfaces are necessary to ensure proper coupling of the probe to the near-edge surface under inspection.
For consistency across the inspection process, Bond Scanners are ideally paired with the Krautkrämer Mentor UT flaw detector. The user-defined workflows walk the inspector through every step of instrument setup — from probe selection and calibration to reporting.
With the Mentor PC Live software, the instrument is connected to a PC through Wifi or ethernet which is especially helpful when the operator is at a different location.
Mentor PC Live performs the instrument’s functions from the PC, with the bonus that setup and data files are saved directly on the PC.Bond Scanner is also available separately.
Bond Scanner Adjustments
Accessories
Compatible with up to 128 el. Arrays with Tyco connector. Also includes extra hot swappable battery, HDMI, and ethernet ports.
Compatible with 32 element arrays with standard Tyco connector
Includes USB, HDMI, Ethernet and Encoder ports.
Allows to connect multiple Bond Scanner Probes to the Mentor UT. This flexible solution allows the operation with different probes at the same time without disconnection and connection of probes during the inspection.
The Splitter Box consists of a “Base Box” that is connected do the Mentor UT device.
To connect the two Bond Scanner probes LA-10 32 Flex and LA-10 32 8-18, two 32 Element Channel Boxes are attached to the Base Box (MUX-Module required).
Part Numbers:
- UA600638 Base box
- UA600496 32 channels box