Customer
Based in Austria, the customer is a global manufacturer of sophisticated test and measurement equipment for the automotive industry.
Challenge
Being the leading supplier to automotive industry giants, the client places primary importance on the precision and high quality of its products.
For this reason, the client’s measurement equipment, in particular emission testing benches, must be checked and calibrated regularly to comply with the specified industry standards and certifications (for example, Euro 6, CFR, US EPA, etc.).
One automated gas measurement line contains 5–8 gas analyzers. Testing the emission of one vehicle may require 1–6 such lines working simultaneously. When performed manually, calibration and checks may take weeks or even months depending on the equipment. To avoid time-consuming operations, the customer decided to automate its calibration process.
Solution
Applied Systems’ team developed an automated system for calibration and check procedures according to the customer’s requirements. It provides a number of graphical interfaces allowing the user to parameterize checks, schedule them for launch, and manage them in a database.
Results
The automated calibration system has enabled the customer to perform all calibration and check operations in an easy and natural way. For example, the customer doesn’t have to deal with entering parameters or saving data – the automated calibration system takes care of it.
Calibration automation software has a significant impact on speeding up measurement equipment certification and minimizing costs. Now the average annual parameters of one automated gas measurement line equal:
• 500 calibration operations;
• 250 hours of calibration;
• 80 types of checking and calibration operations;
• 1,000 pages of reports.
Scheduling checks has made it possible to run them at any time, even by night. On the whole, calibration downtime has been reduced to just a few hours. Reports are quickly generated according to the standards and safely archived in a database: it is possible to restore them at any time or export into another database.
