Non-destructive Analysis of Flake Properties in Automotive Paints with Full-field Optical Coherence Tomography and 3D Segmentation

Zhang, J, Williams, BM ORCID: 0000-0001-5930-287X, Lawman, S, Atkinson, D, Zhang, Z ORCID: 0000-0002-3004-6697, Shen, YC ORCID: 0000-0002-8915-1993 and Zheng, Y ORCID: 0000-0002-7873-0922 (2017) Non-destructive Analysis of Flake Properties in Automotive Paints with Full-field Optical Coherence Tomography and 3D Segmentation. Optics Express, 25 (16). pp. 18614-18628.

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Abstract

Automotive coating systems are designed to protect vehicle bodies from corrosion and enhance their aesthetic value. The number, size and orientation of small metallic flakes in the base coat of the paint has a significant effect on the appearance of automotive bodies. It is important for quality assurance (QA) to be able to measure the properties of these small flakes, which are approximately 10μm in radius, yet current QA techniques are limited to measuring layer thickness. We design and develop a time-domain (TD) full-field (FF) optical coherence tomography (OCT) system to scan automotive panels volumetrically, non-destructively and without contact. We develop and integrate a segmentation method to automatically distinguish flakes and allow measurement of their properties.We test our integrated system on nine sections of five panels and demonstrate that this integrated approach can characterise small flakes in automotive coating systems in 3D, calculating the number, size and orientation accurately and consistently. This has the potential to significantly impact QA testing in the automotive industry.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	optical coherence tomography, image processing, image analysis, protective coatings, nondestructive testing
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	05 Jul 2017 11:25
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 07:00
DOI:	10.1364/OE.25.018614
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3008333