The pressure to produce high quality products faster and at lower costs has never been greater. The technology now exists to capture objects and turn them into digital assets. Increasingly, 3D scanning solutions are also used where a comparison of a complex surface to a CAD design is required. In applications where CAD models don’t exist, laser scanning rapidly produces accurate 3D representations that can be turned into CAD designs used for prototyping, die making, product development, benchmarking and many other applications.

Plowman Craven 3D are passionate about providing a bespoke service that allows the efficient utilisation of digital information for a full range of measurement, modelling, reverse engineering, CAD comparison and prototyping applications.

We use a 7 axis, infinite-rotation, Cimcore articulated measuring arm or portable Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM), a Perceptron laser scanner system and InnovMetric Polyworks point cloud handling software. The Perceptron laser scanner uses solid state, non-contact, laser-based technology to optically generate a line of points at the rate of 23,040 points per second. This is far beyond the rate of traditional contact or single-point acquisition technology and simplifies complex projects without compromising accuracy.

Close range laser scanning systems use optical triangulation over a projected laser line. A mirror deflects a low-powered laser beam and a linear Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) camera observes each point of the laser spot on the object. Laser scanning using triangulation is effectively independent of reflectivity, texture or colour of the object surface. Once translated, the profile is married with the other profiles to produce a 3D topography of the object accurate to around 20 to 30 microns, finer than the thickness of a human hair.

The cloud of points created is compatible with many third party software products where inspection, reverse engineering, or other applications are performed. With our scanning system we can also reverse engineer your existing product that you do not have any CAD data for. We take your existing part or component, scan it and transfer it into our CAD system. By interfacing this data with a CNC milling machines we can replicate the part with incredible precision.

other scanning solutions