System monitors quality of wire terminations

A system representing a major advance in the quality control of wire termination is now available from Tyco Electronics.

A system representing a major advance in the quality control of wire termination is now available from Tyco Electronics.

Offering levels of control and analysis not available from any other system currently available, the Tyco solution will be welcomed in any quality enhancement programme which aims at zero-defect performance for leads and harnesses.

Conventional systems use only crimp force as a measure of crimp process conformance.

However, there are typical quality problems, such as missing strands, short brush and partial stripping, which are not always detected by variations of force.

Therefore, crimp force alone is not sufficient for 100% confidence in crimp quality.

Unlike other systems, the Tyco Electronics CQM (crimp quality monitor) is two-dimensional.

Using advanced real-time monitoring, the system measures not only the applied crimp force, but calculates the crimp height during the crimping cycle, so that a force/displacement curve can be derived.

Variations from this curve can be a symptom of a number of problems, such as the use of the wrong wire, improper positioning of the wire stop, or even tooling wear.

Featuring an auto-adjust facility, which can trigger automatic shut height adjustment of the G-Terminator, when ongoing statistical analysis indicates that crimp height control limits are in danger of being exceeded, the Tyco Electronics CQM uses a solid-state displacement sensor in conjunction with the force sensor and a mathematical algorithm to calculate the actual crimp height.

This innovative approach to height determination means the system has a measurement accuracy of 5um (0.0002in), which is within the six sigma quality level.

Able to be used with Tyco Electronics bench and automatic lead-making machines, the Tyco CQM features an LCD monitor which displays information such as current crimp height, as well as a running bar graph of previous values.

Other displays include job and system setups, batch and job statistics, and system diagnostics.

These are all accessible through easy-to-follow, menu-driven screens using the keypad located under the display screen.

The CQM can also serve as a data collection point which downloads crimp data and batch and job statistics to a printer via an RS-232 interface, and can store data for up to 200 part numbers and 200 applicator IDs.

As with all Tyco Electronics systems, the CQM is manufactured under an ISO 9001 certified quality process.

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