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PLASTICS

Injection moulding: defects hard to describe with a single rule.

Plastic products — housings, technical components, injection-moulded parts — have defects that vary in shape between batches and moulding tools, which makes classic rule-based inspection difficult.

Injection moulding generates defects with high natural variability: flash, sink marks, short shots, edge burrs. Their shape and size depend on machine parameters, mould temperature and raw-material batch — which makes them hard to describe with one fixed geometric rule.

Plastic surfaces also vary — matte, glossy, textured. That directly affects lighting choice: poorly chosen lighting can hide a defect or, conversely, generate false reflections that look like one. That's why qualification starts with assessing camera, optics and lighting for the specific colour and texture of the material.

Different defect types often co-occur on the same product in this industry — flash and contamination, or deformation and a crack — which needs to be accounted for when defining pilot scope.

What we look at during qualification

  • 01 Colour and texture variation between raw-material batches
  • 02 Lighting choice for matte, glossy or textured surfaces
  • 03 Telling an acceptable process deviation apart from a real defect
  • 04 Number of colour or geometry variants handled on one station

Common applications in this industry

FAQ

Plastics

Will one model handle several colours of the same product?+

It depends on how much colour affects defect visibility. Recipes in AIVQC Production let you configure inspection separately for different variants on the same station.

Does a raw-material batch change require retraining the model?+

Not always — it depends on how much the material's appearance changes. This is one of the questions assessed during data preparation in Trainer.