Incorporated in 1984, the company is based in Noida, India and produces over 2,500 different types and sizes of regular eye, spring eye, drilled end and atraumatic needles in large quantities. The company currently exports 80% of its output to Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa for use in a wide range of procedures from ophthalmic to cardiovascular.
Strict quality assurance procedures are adhered to, as the needles must conform to worldwide standards such as IS-9165: Bureau of Indian Standards and the German Vornorm DIN-13170. To meet these standards, Quality Needles tests its products for sharpness, stiffness, ductility and other characteristics.
The tools that produce the needles are also monitored closely and the manufacturer’s success is largely attributed to economical in-house development of its own production equipment, tools and technology. External suppliers were either unable to guarantee the levels of quality required, or the parts would have had to be imported and were simply too costly.
The feed wheel, for example, is a particularly critical part in the manufacturing process, as it is used to transport needles from station to station. The EN 31 carbon alloy steel component features grooves that vary in size, typically between 0.2mm and 0.9mm, for carrying the needles. Accuracy and concentricity are very important for its functionality.
Anchan Mago, general manager at Quality Needles comments: “After recently upgrading our production facilities, including the introduction of a new 5-axis CNC machining centre, our previous manual measurement methods using callipers, micrometers and other manual techniques could not cope with the increased throughput.
“So we set out to find a comprehensive and accurate quality assurance method that could not only increase measuring productivity, but also introduce a higher level of precision and repeatability.”
Quality Needles needed a metrology solution that was accurate and reliable enough to check the profile, straightness, dimensions and concentricity of components in a pressurised, high productivity environment. A feed wheel was used as a test piece to determine if the various laser scanners benchmarked were capable of measuring surfaces and features.
Mr Mago adds: “The Nikon Metrology LC15Dx offered superior insight, which results in the ability to manufacture complex parts much more easily. The angles of the grooves in our feed wheel were too tight for the other laser scanners to measure, and grooves often were not detected at all, but for the LC15Dx it was not an issue.”
With Enhanced Sensor Performance (ESP3) technology and a probing error of just 1.9µm, comparable to tactile probing accuracy, the LC15Dx offers high accuracy for a laser scanner. ESP3 maintains accuracy, speed and data quality by intelligently adapting the laser settings for each measured point in real-time, which is necessary to cope with the shiny surfaces and varying reflections. Point clouds generated during inspection routines are compared to original CAD models, with coloured deviation plots indicating where errors have occurred.
Nikon offered its Altera coordinate measuring machine with an SP25 scanning probe, mainly to measure inner diameters of the wheels, as well as the LC15Dx laser scanning head. The multi-sensor solution left Quality Needles in no doubt about which system to select.
Mr Mago advised that the increase in productivity and quality helped the company to recover the capital cost of the metrology solution within one year.
He concludes: “Needle quality has improved and productivity has increased by 3.1%, which is quite appreciable considering that we work on 110 million cycles per month using the wheels in question.”
Nikon Metrology www.nikonmetrology.com
