News 01/2009

PHOTON LINES, new distributor for STIL’s products in France and Great Britain

STIL and PHOTON LINES announce their decision to collaborate through a distributor agreement on French and British markets. Created in 2001, PHOTON LINES is a distribution and services company in optical instrumentation (non contact measurement, imaging…). This partnership concerns both ranges of sensors for dimensional measurement (CCS and CHR) and non contact color (RUBY).
STIL’s optical sensors can be implemented in all industrial sectors. They allow measuring all types of materials as well for manufacturing control as for research and development. With measurement ranges stretching from 20 microns to 25 millimeters, STIL’s sensors are best fitted for applications fields such as profilometry, roughness measurements and thickness measurement.

The non contact spectrocolorimeter STIL is gifted with exclusive technical characteristics which allow an easy integration on a production line. The immediate detection of color drifts allows an instant reaction on the production process.

STIL’s technology in the service of TORE SUPRA

In the frame of TORE SUPRA program, the CEA (French Nuclear Agency) of Cadarache, in France, has chosen STIL SA company to develop a 3D measurement system (Chromatic Confocal system) , MICROMESURE, in order to characterize the wear of one of the essential tokamak’s components during the annual maintenance operations.

Inside of the core, components are in contact with the plasma and are subject to many thermal constraints. A direct consequence of this internal heat flow is the erosion of the core limiter which consists of carbon bricks. This erosion entails the appearance of an eroded carbon deposit on the limiter’s surface. This surface becomes heterogeneous then and it is necessary to analyze it in order to determine the life time of the components which face the plasma.

During the year 2007, the first part of STIL SA’s project has consisted in designing and manufacturing a non-contact 3D measurement system in order to perform the surface topography of a 0.6m2 section of the limiter (the total surface of the limiter is 7m2) outside of the core.

The STIL MICROMESURE system has allowed realizing, ex-situ, the 3D mapping of this limiter’s section. Each 0.6m2 section contains 45 areas to analyze. One 200mm x 100mm area represents 3 millions of points to acquire (measurement steps: 60µm x 100µm) . Moving from an area to another has required an operator manual intervention. The time to measure the 0.6m2 section, representing 135 millions of points, has been 10 days.

In 2008, the second part of STIL SA’s project has consisted in manufacturing a fully motorized and automatic MICROMESURE system offering the possibility to analyze the limiter section inside the core.

The technical specifications of this new measurement system remain the same in terms of resolution and accuracy.

This MICROMESURE system consists of two sets of motorized translation stages, one CHR150 optoelectronic controller and two optical measuring heads allowing to consecutivelly measure the top surface and the leading edge of the limiter.

The optical heads chosen to perform the measurement are CL4-MG35, for the top surface, and CL5-MG20, for the leading edge.

The mechanical structure of the optical measurement system has been manufactured in collaboration with AVANTIS company.

This new system is meant to optimize the acquisition time and to perform measurements in real conditions, inside the tokamak.

The use of this system, during the annual maintenance operations of the core, will permit a very precise characterization of the limiter wear in order to better understand the exchange phenomena between the plasma and the walls.