Improving Performance of Crimp Signal Analysis by Falling Edge Alignment and Parameter Error Estimation in CFM

A Crimp Force Monitor (CFM) is equipment for detecting crimp errors by analyzing crimp signals obtained from force and strain sensors. The analysis is commonly performed by aligning a measured crimp signal with a reference signal and comparing their difference. Current analysis methods often suffer from wrong alignments that result in false negative detections. This paper presents a new crimp signal analysis method in CFM. First, a falling edge alignment is proposed that matches falling edges of the measured and the reference signals by minimizing the absolute difference summation. Second, a signal parameter error is introduced to evaluate the crimp quality difference between the measured signal and the reference. For calculating the signal parameter error, part of a signal is identified and divided into several regions to maximize the signal parameter errors. Experiments showed that the proposed method can improve the signal alignment and accurately detect bad crimps especially with the strain sensor.