Better Quality, Improved Safety, and Lower Costs for Tire Manufacturers

Tire manufacturers require precise control of and often struggle to measure and manage the costly calendering process. In calendering, steel or fabric is placed between two heavy rollers along with rubber, sandwiching the material being coated. As the material moves through the rollers, the pressure forces the rubber onto the steel or fabric, adhering the two. In order to manage cost and efficiency, manufacturers must create a baseline for process improvement, including flattening the sheet to allow for reduction in gauge or thickness targets and controlling the top- and bottom-material measurements (balance).

Delivering significant savings

Just a minor reduction in tire sheet gauge thickness can result in substantial savings: in a typical plant, reducing the gauge by as little as 0.01mm can reduce material cost more than $500,000/year.

Optimization of the sheet profile allows minimization of the sheet thickness while still meeting product quality requirements. In a typical plant, an optimized sheet might allow as much as a 0.025 reduction in gauge, resulting in more than $1.2M/year in savings, as well as reduced scrap and increased product quality.

Luna Innovations and Bridgestone Tire are working together to drive better product quality and reduced material costs for tire manufacturers by using Luna’s innovative Terahertz technologies to provide safe, fast accurate thickness measurements and simultaneously compensate for changes in composition of ply construction.

To help achieve this, Luna and Bridgestone are increasing the sampling frequency of the measurements, using Luna’s single-sided T-Gauge terahertz sensor, since the Luna system can take 100 measurements per second. At the Bridgestone facility, the total scan time is less than 20 seconds, so Bridgestone can take around 3,600 measurements in back-forth scans at 4 inches / sec, providing nearly 300,000 THz measurements over 1000m.

通过使用Luna的太赫兹仪控制压延机，轮胎制造商可以减少所有层的厚度变化，并使其更接近最小厚度。这样可以在不使用多余材料的情况下将板材的所有部分保持在最低限度以上，并保持各层之间的适当平衡，从而节188金宝慱官网省资金。

Additionally, most traditional measurement gauges measure mass to figure out how thick the product is, while Luna's THz gauges directly assess thickness, providing a more precise measurement.

Safer and more environmentally conscious

在众多好处中，Luna THz系统消除了安全问题，因为它没有核辐射或电离辐射，也没有激光/眼睛危害。公司还可以通过消除合理的x射线源，通过改进产品加工和减少浪费来减少材料和能源的使用，从而改善其环境状况。

Ruggedized for harsh conditions

Luna’s industrial sensors are also ruggedized to withstand harsh operating environments and measurements are not affected by the presence of dust, dirt, humidity, temperature or air pressure, making it ideal for measuring an array of materials for a variety of markets including aerospace, military, building products, plastics, paper, and pharmaceuticals, spectroscopy and THz imaging.