Tire Tread Measurement
Description
Tire manufacturers and Used Tire Reuse Centers want to satisfy their customers, and protect themselves from liabilities. Manufacturers are moving to 100% tire inspection for tread depth, defects and abnormality detection. Defects not only cause potential safety issues but they can also introduce unwanted vibration into the vehicle suspension system and cause excessive road noise. Belts can be overlapped, or not cover the complete tire surface, causing weak or bubbled areas and imbalances. The tread depth can be too shallow, leading to decreased service life. An uneven tire can cause excessive run out and vibration.
MTI was approached by a major manufacturer requesting a solution to measure tread depth, run out and blistering. The ProTrak series of 2D lasers to generate go/no-go tire inspection. Our lasers have the resolution and range to measure a variety of tires. Our engineers can work with you to provide tread depth , blister and sidewall profile data to make system implementation easy.
The Laser scanner head has automatic intensity control so it will automatically adjust its intensity and image detector array for optimum sensitivity such that the user does not need to make any manual adjustments. The sensor’s output could be used to measure tread depth, tire uniformity, and also can monitor the sidewall for both appearance and internal belt overlap. The linear array output of the 2D laser allows faster scanning of the tire with more information being gathered at once. It also simplifies fixture in certain applications where the whole tire cross sectional tread pattern can be observed within one or two readings.
