Improving the Winding Angle Measurement for an Effective Process Control

Two vision systems are developed to inspect the winding angle of a filament wound carbon fiber and epoxy resin composite cylinder. The first used system relay on a high-resolution color camera. The second vision system is based on a commercial polarization and exploits the polarization information to process the image. A component inspection strategy is proposed, and the metrological performances are experimentally and carefully evaluated. Using the polarization camera variability of data concerning the winding angle is reduced to the order of 0.5°, promising for a better process control and diagnostics and reducing the probability of voids and defects, which are related to the correspondence of the winding angle to the nominal one. This way the reliability of the pieces realized with composite material, which is a mandatory requirement for this kind of component, could be improved. It also results that the additional computational load is negligible making the polarization camera inspection suitable for an online use.