Stainless Steel is a more and more used material in our daily life and its importance grows according to its variety of applications. On the one hand it presents a beautiful, aesthetic surface and is increasingly used in architecture as paneling of buildings, but it is also part of everyone's kitchen, e.g. at sink units. On the other hand stainless steel is a preferred material because of its specific technical characteristics, for example its gas density which allows to transport materials like acid. Both applications require a perfect surface quality.

To secure a perfect product until now simplest measuring systems are in use - or it is even done by specialized people delivering only subjective and varying results. However, the need to maintain high quality makes early detection of surface defects in the processing phases extremely important. Early detection can prevent equipment damage and expensive processing of flawed material.

The classification and documentation of the entire surface's quality in all production phases will benefit plant operations. This requires complete recognition of defects and their classification according to type and severity, as well as identification of defect positions on the strip. This can be accomplished only by the use of an automated inspection system capable of providing a complete examination of the entire steel strip to detect and classify defects at full production speed.

Parsytec developed a new generation of automatic surface inspection systems which capture and evaluate data at all stages exclusively through software. This means on the one hand that all process-relevant quality measurements are available immediately and automatically as objective data, ready to be linked with other plant information systems. On the other hand the software solution provides high flexibility, i.e. can be easily adapted to different steel surfaces and equipment-specific defects. The system is installed at one of the leading steel manufacturers in Europe and the paper will describe the experiences they made with Parsytec HTS-2.