Leak Tester

This is another application done with NAS from about 1998. We did a lot of vision, gauging and leak testing applications for Tennex, a Japanese cooperative venture in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. This company has since been bought by Mahle, a German company. They make a lot of injection molded automotive parts and filter products.

This application illustrates the use of some great off the shelf products. Cosmo makes the leak testing equipment which consists of some valving and the control unit you see above. The pressure is supplied by a piece of tooling with a Fast-Test connector on it, an air bladder type sealing mechanism. The frame of the station is made of aluminum extrusion from 80-20, another great product that we used to build a lot of equipment out of. The vision system on the front right and back left corners is from DVT, an Atlanta based company that was bought by Cognex.

Much of my early programming and electrical design experience came from building small test machines such as this. They were wonderful training experiences because we were able to build and ship them very quickly and then move on to the next project. One day I hope to be able to work on some of these smaller systems once again. It could almost be considered a hobby!