Internal Integrity and Reverse Engineering of a Plastic Molded Part
This is a great example to show how Computed Tomography (CT) can be used for not only evaluating the internal integrity of a part but also for reverse engineering.
On the left had side we see a surface volume of a CT scan of this plastic injection molded part. It is very obvious that there are a substantial amount of voids showing up in this image. When we put this semi-transparent view on this surface, you can rotate the volume around as if it is a transparent part that you can see inside of to inspect.
In the middle image you can see these large and small voids. Through examination of these voids, we are evaluating whether or not there is a leak path that is occurring or something close to the surface that could generate a leak path in the future.
In the far right image, we show a printed part. We took the CT data and we generated a STL from that, cleaned up the STL to remove those voids so they will not be printed in the new part. In the end, we get this printed part on the right hand side with great structure and no voids.
