Customer:
DePuy Orthopaedics
Warsaw, Indiana, United States
Background:
DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company, designs, manufactures and distributes orthopaedic devices and supplies including hip, knee,
extremity, trauma, orthobiologics, and operating room products.
Components like this knee implant, made by DePuy Orthopaedics (shown implanted inside the human body in the X-ray), are checked with laser scanning, because of the complex sculptured contours required for proper functioning.
Situation:
As DePuy developed more complex sculpted medical device components, implants and prosthetics, it found its quality assurance procedures were limited by traditional touch probing technologies that were expensive and time consuming for use on what were often custom, one-of-a-kind parts. Because its devices were being used by human patients, DePuy needed parts to be extremely reliable and desired a more complete inspection tool to thoroughly measure and inspect its products.
Solution:
To obtain more accurate measurements, DePuy selected the ShapeGrabber® Ai300 3D laser scanning system. The ShapeGrabber solution proved to be faster and more versatile than other laser probe systems that DePuy evaluated, and the Ai300 was able to measure the complex, compound curves of DePuy parts quickly and accurately. Since choosing the ShapeGrabber system, DePuy has found that it can reconfigure the scanner quickly to accommodate parts of different sizes, and can perform the quality assurance inspections it requires to ensure its low-volume parts are properly formed and sized.
“For complete inspection of our anatomical implants, we opted for the touchless approach of laser scanning. Our first laser probe system was very slow and had limited function, because it could only acquire one point at a time, and could only measure diameters. We moved to ShapeGrabber’s Ai300, a much faster and more versatile alternative”.
– Roger Erickson,
DePuy Orthopaedics, a Johnson and Johnson subsidiary.