Automated laser engraving system for the calibration and manufacturing of nonlinear scales for electrical measuring instruments

Abstract

Currently, most of the techniques of dial manufacturing for electrical measuring instruments are low-productive and expensive owing to the single-piece dials’ manufacturing. Application of laser engraving system as a way to produce individual dials for the electrical measuring instruments is described in this paper. The automated system is expected to increase productivity, reduce cost, and improve the quality of the final product. A novel structure of hardware–software system was created for single-piece dials’ manufacturing and special novel software system was developed to control the system and to verify scales’ quality. Damped oscillations parameters of instrument pointer were determined. The real-time recognition algorithm of instrument scale was developed. These innovative solutions have been allowed to upgrade the instruments’ accuracy class from 2.5 to 1.5 and to reduce the time of making information marks on the dial by 13.2 times in comparison with traditional techniques. The following technological operations have been excluded: relief printing, manual calibration, and manual scale marks drawing.