Method and device for the automatic detection of surface defects for continuously cast products with continuous mechanical removal of the material

Abstract

A method for the automatic detection of surface defects for continuously cast products (2) with continuous mechanical removal of the material, which products are separated into part lengths while still in the hot state and are introduced before the final rolling in a rolling train to a material removing machine (1), in particular to a grinding machine, in which the material of the continuously cast product (2) is removed as a function of the defective areas determined by a defect localising equipment (6; 7) more or less intensively from the surface(s) to be machined, which method provides that the surface defect (12a, 12b) is introduced by the defect localising equipment (6; 7) as pictorial information to a picture processing processor (11) and read in by a computer (13), comprising an integrated comparison and evaluation module (15) and connected superposed to the machine control (17), in which computer the transmitted digital pictorial information is compared in a sample recognition process with stored pictures of typical surface defects and the results like length, width and area of the defect are either directly processed and stored in a coordinate-related set of defect area (16) in accordance with a classification with regard to the relevance of the surface defects, or, after the storing in a set of surface defect data are classified in a subsequent evaluation process. The defect localising equipment is constructed as an inspection unit (6; 7) which has at least one camera (8) and a lighting equipment (9) which are arranged on a transverse girder (4) extending over the resting table (3) and the inspection unit (6; 7) is connected to a comparison and evaluation module (15) and to a computer (13) having a coordinate-related set of defect data (16).

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.