Leak tester incorporates process monitor

More powerful software, process drift alarms, and Ethernet communication are key trends shaping production leak testers.

Process control using advanced leak and flow testers has become important to manufacturers according to Alex Gitlevich, president of Adar Corp.

Adds Gitlevich, "We see leak and flow testers evolving from sorting devices to process control equipment".

The new generation of leak, flow, and functional testers do more than sort out bad parts and store the numbers.

The trend is to add monitors and alarms for production reject rate.

Reject rate is not the same as leak rate.

Leak rate is the maximum allowed leak in a product.

This is what the tester uses to make the accept and reject decision.

Reject rate, on the other hand, is the number of rejects produced over a time period.

The reject rate limit is typically established based on historical data for a particular product.

For reject rate monitoring, it is now possible to instruct leak testers to take a continuing series of product quality snapshots.

For example, a test process might have an established control window of three rejected parts in 30 minutes.

When the tester determines the reject rate exceeds the preset limit, an alarm is activated.

At that point, a supervisor or manager can decide to continue operating with higher-than-normal rejects, or to stop to make process adjustments.

With the power of a computer-based leak tester, the reject rate alarm can be a message sent over an existing general-purpose network to a supervisor's office computer.

This kind of fast and continuous analysis, networking, and reporting has just recently become available in the Pantera 9000 by Adar Corporation.

The Test Faster Division of Adar Corporation builds multichannel leak testers that plug into any computer's USB port to form a powerful and flexible test system for bench or automated machines.

Thanks to open architecture, the USB computer-based test system is simple to change and to upgrade at any time with the latest computer, software, displays, and related accessories.

Pantera functions as an intelligent device on a computer's USB port.

The tester communicates in both directions with the computer to receive setup instructions and to report test result information.

Test results are stored on the computer's hard drive or flash memory.

The computer can store one million test resets and each test has a unique number along with date and time stamp.

Typical test times are under one second with new high-speed processing, custom software, and the latest sensor technology.

"We are advancing leak and flow testing to the next level by combining electronics, pneumatics, and information processing and then placing it right in the manufacturing world", says Gitlevich.

"Through an entire package of tools, software, and input devices, firms who produce parts, products and subassemblies can make high-quality measurements which can be used to take action in process improvement".

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