Corrosion Inspector

During the development of coating systems with improved corrosion resistance as well as for quality control of coated components, a large number of coated test plates are produced. These plates are scribed and then weathered in special climate chambers to start the corrosion. Conventionally, the resulting corrosion phenomena are then manually and visually evaluated, often using a magnification glass with an integrated scale, a very tedious work, which is error-prone and subjective.

The Corrosion Inspector scans a standardized test plate in 0.8 seconds with an optical resolution of 22 µm/pixel. The coaxial line illumination, either as a bright field or as a dark field, ensures the high contrast image of the corrosion structures. The software automatically detects the shape, length and corrosion area and evaluates it according to the relevant standards.

The system was developed for rapid and objective corrosion evaluations with high sample throughput. The automatic evaluation including documentation in an image and Excel sheet takes 5 seconds. The system supports color and monochrome grayscale images.

Bright-field and dark-field illumination
To detect the relevant microstructures, bright-field or dark-field illumination is used.
With bright-field illumination, the light strikes the sample surface perpendicularly. Flat surfaces facing the sensor appear bright, the light hitting the edges is reflected away from the sensor. They appear dark.
With dark-field illumination, the light is directed onto the test surface with an angle. Only light from e.g. edges that cause the light to reflect into the sensor appear bright, flat surfaces e.g. facing the sensor appear dark.

Analysis and Control Software SKan-CI
The software SKan-CI offers a simple control for the scanner system. After scanning the test sample, you have a wide range of image processing functions to get the best input for the analysis.

SKan-CI automatically recognizes a predefined set of scribe patterns and also automatically assigns, measures and ranks the corrosion phenomena. When desired, the interactive and manual measurement of corrosive phenomena can be performed by the operator.

The program saves the accepted corrosion analysis results as images and tabular data, together with the treatment and analytical processing information, for retrieval, comparison and documentation.

The software supports also the offline evaluation, without a connection to the Corrosion Inspector hardware. After loading a stored image, grayscaled or color, the corrosion phenomena can be evaluated with all available methods. This allows an independent reanalysis or a new evaluation.