Industry Leading Coated Glass Production: Vitro Architectural Glass installs quality in-spection systems by ISRA VISION

Leading supplier of glass products in North America optimizes quality assurance of coated glass with ISRA’s P²-product series

Industry Leading Coated Glass Production: Vitro Architectural Glass installs quality inspection systems by ISRA VISION

Atlanta (GA) / Cheswick (PA) – Vitro Architectural Glass strengthens their quality assurance process by installing four new optical inspection systems from ISRA VISION. The North-America based glass giant decided to take their inspection of Magnetron coated glass sheets to the next level: using the fully automated P²-Coating and P²-Color systems, Vitro ensures virtually perfect glass surfaces – for products free of debris, scratches, coating inhomogenities and many more defects that occur when low emissivity coatings are applied.

Vitro’s goal is to provide the highest quality architectural coated glass in the industry, which prompted the company to begin looking for a way to ensure quality consistency across all of its manufacturing locations. Installing the P²-Coating systems meant solving several problems with a single solution: “The PowerPlate systems have made product quality more consistent from day to day and across all of our production lines”, explains Joe Koepfinger, Senior Staff Engineer at Vitro. According to Koepfinger, production waste was also successfully reduced.

ISRA uses the most advanced technology with camera based inspection that detects even the smallest deviations or defects that lead to production and quality issues. Employing multiple cameras and light sources positioned on both sides of the glass, P²-Coating scans the glass surface to identify defects far more precisely and efficiently than manual inspection can. When the rejection criteria have been exceeded, the entire piece is discarded.

”Additionally, the systems have helped to optimize the maintenance and repair cycles of the vacuum coaters, and our research department uses data from the inspection systems to better understand the factors that lead to production issues.” This multifold saving potential leads to a very quick return on investment.

A valued customer for many years, Vitro has reaffirmed ISRA’s best-in-class technology and reliable customer support from their own experience. “The ISRA Vision team has always been very supportive during installation, system configuration and in addressing any problems,” adds Koepfinger. Consequently, the company turned to the global leader in machine vision to install inspection systems on four Vitro coating lines.

POWERPLATE or P²-Coating, is the fully automatic inspection solution for coated glass, making manual inspection obsolete. It enables the successful recognition of coating defects such as pinholes and arcing-defects, as well as edge defects like shells, all while inspecting in-process and down to the μm range. The combination of multi-view, multi-mode, and multi-spectral technology ensures superior inspection results. By delivering detailed information on defects, ISRA’s inspection systems allow for direct insights into process quality. The result: optimized processing, reduced operating costs and increased profitability. By using special high-end cameras, progressive frame grabber, and high power white light illumination, combined with sophisticated detection and evaluation software, P²-systems enable high-quality product control and throughput.