The current productivity requirements to facilitate the rapid delivery of high quality products to market in which the accuracy achieved in the manufacturing plays a prominent role, have promoted significant advances in the machining and inspection phases on CNC machines. On Machine Measuring techniques (OMM) stands out among these advances, which aim at integration on production machines of contact and non-contact inspection technologies, traditionally used on coordinate measuring machines (CMM). Nevertheless, application of these techniques shows a series of problems such as those regarding to the surface accessibility for digitizing, precision and operational speed, for which there is no a wholly satisfactory answer yet, from an industrial point of view. Therefore, enhancements on precision and operating speed for on-machine inspection, by improving the current techniques or by the introduction of newer ones, constitute the main challenges of future in the field of OMM.

Taking this into account, as well as the work developed up to date by the research team in the previous proposal, the present Project aims at evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of a non-contact inspection technique named Conoscopic Holography, applied for on-CNC-machine inspection of machined surfaces. As particular results, technological recommendations to obtain the optimal accuracy and speed for the type of parts and materials under study will be searched.

This way, it is intended to design and implement a system based on conoscopic sensors -both punctual of high definition as line emission-, to integrate them into a Coordinates Measuring Machine an into a 3 axis Machining Center and to compare -based on productivity and precision- the information acquired by the systems with that provided by the standard on-machine inspection systems using touch trigger probes. Likewise, information from both systems will be compared to reference models obtained on a compact Conoscopic Holography 3D scanner, under laboratory conditions. Surfaces generated by milling will be used as testing specimens, which must be representative of models of common parts in the industrial application of machining centers, such as sheet metal dies and complex surfaces of turbine blades.