Area Measurement Of Leather Hides

Challenge Details

The Leather hide is measured and sold by area (sq ft). The size of these leathers varies from 2 to 40 sq.ft. Leather goes through various stages before it is ready to be shipped. Leather needs to be trimmed to remove irregularities at the edges leading to area loss. The area loss needs to be measured and tracked to keep it under check. Thus, it is important to measure the initial area of the leather hide and baseline. It is thus required to develop a system to measure the area of the leather hide for better process control and take the necessary steps to avoid wastage.

We need a system to measure and log the area of the leather hide while it is moving on the conveyor (width of conveyor ranges from 1-3 meters and speed of the conveyor is 25m/min). The data should be stored into a temporary memory which should either be available online or can be saved to a memory stick, on a daily basis. The network should maintain a log of data which can be pulled up whenever necessary. The system should be installed between the leather either before or after the spraying station, as shown in Figure 1.

Success Criteria

1. The solution should be cost-effective (the unit should be available at around Rs. 20,000)

2. The solution should be easily implemented on the production line

3. The solution should be easily replicated to different production lines

4. Measurement should have a tolerance of less than +/- 0.2% in area