SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Quantification of fragments captured in 48-sheet bundles of ½-inch thick, 4’x8’ fiberboard during arena testing is expensive and labor-intensive. Technicians now spend thousands of hours finding and recovering fragments, measuring position in three dimensions, then cleaning and weighing each one. Inspecting a single bundle can take 30 hours, at $100/hour. Post-test data collection can exceed $500,000. In a recently completed Phase II, ZKxKZ demonstrated that an automated inspection system based on the use of quantitative x-ray technology can speed the identification and quantification of fragments in post-test bundles of fragment capture media by a factor of about 30X. The prototype system built and demonstrated in PII worked well, providing good results when measured data was compared to traditionally hand-picked fragments. These tests suggested some improvements to the prototype that should further improve performance. In this proposed effort, ZKxKZ will make some significant modifications to the existing prototype hardware and software simplifying and speeding operation. The program will conclude with using the prototype to again do a comparative study of hand-picked versus x-ray data.
