Friday, April 20, 2012

Relay Device Under Microscope

Microscope World has a customer who manufactures relay devices. A relay is a device that takes a smaller source of electrical power and uses it to manually control a larger source of electrical power. Typically, a low voltage or low current source, which is more easily manageable with control circuits, sends a signal to energize an electromagnetic coil. When the coil is activated, the magnetic field moves a plunger type device which has contacts that serve as a switch for the larger voltage or current device. In essence, the contacts complete the path for the circuit and allows a load to begin to operate using the higher voltage or current that is supplied through the contacts' connections.

This customer needed to view their relay devices during the manufacturing process to look for defects or flaws.

Relay captured at 30x magnification.

Because the relay device is not microscopically small, a stereo microscope system was created for this customer. The system created included the following:

Meiji EMZ-8TR stereo zoom microscope on a lighted post stand using the DCM3 microscope camera and software. The software allows the end user to make measurements and label the image before saving it to a file for reference.