Tire Mold Measuring Machine (TMM)

The state-of-the-art quality control procedure for tire mold inspection is a manual measurement of certain features on a sample basis. This approach cannot lead to reliable results as it is strongly dependent on the skills of the technician and is very time-consuming.

In order to overcome the limitations of mold inspection, inmess started the development of an automated full-field optical measurement system in 2018. This system is able to measure a complete sidewall mold within approx. 10 minutes with high accuracy in the range of 5µm.

Core component of the system is the laser-based optical sensor. In contrast to classical triangulation sensors a shadowing due to different illumination and detection directions is prevented, which is crucial for the measurement of molds including ribs and sipes. The sensor itself has a repeatability below 1µm and a measurement frequency of 200.000 points per second.