Ağır Sanayi

The Challenge: Quality Control for Oversized Fabrications

Heavy industry — energy equipment, structural steel, pressure vessels, mining machinery, and large-scale fabrication — presents inspection challenges that conventional metrology equipment was never designed to handle. When a single weldment weighs several tons and spans meters in every direction, you cannot move it to a CMM. When production happens in fabrication bays rather than clean rooms, you need inspection tools that work in real-world shop floor conditions.

SuPAR by CDMVision enables heavy industry quality teams to bring the inspection to the part rather than the other way around. Using iPad-based augmented reality, engineers overlay full-scale CAD models onto physical fabrications — verifying weld positions, nozzle orientations, bracket locations, and structural member alignments directly on the shop floor.

Key Inspection Challenges in Heavy Industry

• Part size and weight — Components in heavy industry routinely exceed the measurement envelope of conventional CMMs. Moving parts to metrology labs is impractical or impossible.
• Harsh shop floor conditions — Fabrication environments involve welding fumes, overhead cranes, and temperature variations. Inspection tools must be portable and rugged enough for these conditions.
• Long fabrication cycles — Large weldments are built up over weeks or months. In-process inspection at intermediate stages is essential to catch deviations before they are buried under subsequent fabrication steps.
• One-off and small-batch production — Many heavy industry products are custom-engineered. Building inspection fixtures for a single unit is economically unjustifiable.
• Multi-trade coordination — Fabrication involves welders, fitters, machinists, and assemblers working in sequence. Quality issues discovered late in the process cascade into expensive rework across multiple trades.

How SuPAR Addresses Heavy Industry Inspection

SuPAR’s iPad-based approach is uniquely suited to heavy industry because it eliminates the two biggest constraints of traditional metrology: fixed measurement envelopes and extensive setup time. Import the CAD model in CATIA, JT, CGR, or OBJ format into SuPAR Composer, define inspection checkpoints at critical features, and deploy to iPad. Walk around the fabrication — whether it is a 3-meter pressure vessel or a 15-meter structural beam — and verify each feature against the 3D model.

For in-process inspection, SuPAR is especially valuable. Check weld prep locations before welding begins. Verify nozzle orientations after tack welding but before final welding. Confirm bracket positions before bolting on sub-assemblies. Each check takes minutes rather than the hours required for laser tracker setup and survey.

Heavy Industry Use Cases

Pressure Vessel and Heat Exchanger Inspection

Overlay the 3D model onto fabricated pressure vessel shells to verify nozzle positions, saddle locations, lifting lug placements, and manway orientations. SuPAR enables dimensional verification at each stage of fabrication — from rolled shell segments through final hydrostatic test readiness.

Structural Steel Fabrication

Verify beam connections, gusset plate positions, bolt hole patterns, and column base plate alignments against the structural model. For steel fabricators producing one-off structures, SuPAR replaces the need for physical templates and manual tape-measure verification at each connection point.

Mining and Material Handling Equipment

Inspect bucket assemblies, conveyor frames, crusher housings, and dragline components. These massive fabrications have critical interface dimensions where components from different fabrication stations must fit together during final assembly. SuPAR catches dimensional issues at the station level before parts move to final assembly.

Energy Equipment: Turbines, Generators, and Transformers

Power generation equipment requires precise alignment of housings, bearing interfaces, and cooling passages. SuPAR enables in-situ inspection of large generator frames, turbine casings, and transformer tank assemblies without moving them to dedicated metrology facilities.

Results and Impact

SuPAR enables heavy industry fabricators to perform dimensional verification 75% faster than traditional 2D drawing comparison methods. For large fabrications that would require multi-day laser tracker surveys, SuPAR delivers actionable inspection results in hours. The elimination of fixture requirements for custom and one-off production saves weeks of lead time and thousands of euros per project.

Digital inspection reports are generated automatically in PDF, XLSX, and 3D formats — providing complete documentation for pressure equipment directive (PED) compliance, structural steel certifications, and customer acceptance inspections. By making in-process inspection fast and practical, SuPAR helps heavy industry quality teams catch deviations early — when correction costs a fraction of what rework would cost after final welding.