Examining the quality of extruded plastic with the nondestructive testing method NAW

Sammanfattning: Defects in a plastic floor material produced in Tarketts factory in Ronneby are causing waste of time and material since it is noticed too late in the production line. The objective of this thesis is to investigate if the nondestructive test method NAW®, which is developed by Acoustic Agree in Ronneby, can be a solution to find the defects at an earlier stage. Nondestructive testing mainly means what the name says; quality tests of a material can be made without causing any damage. One simple example of a nondestructive testing tool is the human eye. By looking at a product defects on the surface can be found. The method used in this thesis, NAW®, is a nonlinear acoustical method. By listening to the material, information about disturbances inside the material can be gathered and interpreted to get a picture of the quality status. Although by listening it does not in this case mean by a human ear but with special equipment since the sound used is high frequent ultrasound. For several material samples, experiments were made both for the references and with introduced defects. It was hard to get definitive results since, for example, even the results for the different reference samples were differing a lot. Nevertheless there are some results pointing in the same direction which means that there is still hope for the possibility to use NAW® as a tool in the production at Tarkett. One important problem in this work is the fact that the defect material is not actually a real defect material but an imitated one with defects made by hand in the experiments. This is a possible error and has to be considered in case of further experiments. Either the imitated defects have to be “improved” or, in the ideal case, real defective material from the factory should be used to get as reliable results as possible.