Lumenous announces the introduction of the newest application of the company’s noncontact active Af testing technology for nitinol and related materials.
06 October 2016
Sunnyvale, CA
Lumenous announced the introduction of the TruePhase Omnis™, the newest application of the company’s noncontact active Af testing technology for nitinol and related materials. The 2016 introduction of the TruePhase QEDii™ brought noncontact technology to the width and breadth of component testing requirements including ultrafine features less than 100 micron wide and large-scale components such as thoracic stents. Various devices that were incompatible with traditional test methods came into testing compliance with the help of TruePhase™ technology.
TruePhase™ uses advanced vision technology to determine the transition of nitinol from its low-temperature martensite phase to its higher-temperature austenite phase. The component is cooled to achieve fully martensitic state, deformed in a prescribed fashion, then warmed up to transition into its austenitic state and recover its neutral shape. The vision engine tracks the component’s shape recovery while the temperature is monitored, and the transition temperature Af is determined, plotted, compared to specification limits, given an Accept/Reject flag, and written to the QA database. Beneficially compared to traditional bend-and-free-recovery (BFR) technique, there is no physical sensor contacting the component. Noncontact technology reduces sources of measurement error and produces a “truly free” recovery.
“We launched our TruePhase™ technology in order to share our in-house capabilities with our suppliers and customers so that, together, we could improve patient outcomes and limit costs. Our flagship Af testing product, TruePhase QEDii™, delivers unique repeatability, ease-of-use, and throughput,” says Lumenous President Todd Dickson. “However, in all things metrology-related, the optimum approach to equipment selection and sampling is a function of production variability, measurement variability, inspection cost, and risk analysis. While the QEDii™ can address the overwhelming majority of cases, the special case of high risk, narrow performance tolerance, and high production volume can call for 100% inspection, which until now was economically infeasible. The TruePhase™ repeatability and scalability was capable of closing this gap, and TruePhase Omnis™ is the solution.”
Aimed at production volumes in the hundreds of thousands per year, the TruePhase Omnis™ employs proven automation technology adapted to device-specific handling and deformation requirements. OmnisTM is suitable for in-line inspection in lean production environments.
