Walk onto most rolling mill floors today, and you’ll find cutting-edge equipment feeding into a measurement process that hasn’t changed much in decades. Manufacturers invest heavily in modern rolling lines for the higher yields and higher quality they promise \u2014 yet many are still checking flatness with a Flatness Step Block gauge or Tapered Gauge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trouble is that these gauges only tell you about the edges. To measure buckle height in the middle of a sheet, an inspector has to bridge a straight beam across it on pillars of equal height, then reach across to measure the gap between the beam and the peak of the wave by hand \u2014 a slow process that still leaves wavelength to be calculated separately before arriving at an I-value, the industry’s standard measure of flatness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Scantron Industrial Products, based in Taunton, UK, has spent more than four decades building non-contact laser measurement systems. Its Proscan range spans everything from a bench-top non-contact profilometer for research and QA labs to the Proscan Magnum, its largest and most capable system built specifically for the metals industry.<\/p>