4Sight Imaging Ltd (4Sight) personnel have many years of experience in specifying, designing and implementing advanced automated visual inspection solutions across a wide range of industrial, medical and surveillance applications.

For the past two years, 4Sight has worked closely with a leading fuel cell industry partner, and has gained an understanding of the process challenges faced by fuel cell manufacturers as they progress towards an economically viable industry.

Use of automated vision during process development and manufacturing ramp-up enables:
• Understanding critical process characteristics and accurate root-cause based problem resolution.
• Reduction in wastage of both material and process proving time through timely and reliable detection of process behaviour outside normal limits.
• Reduction in risk of faults and reliability problems emerging in prototype stacks and systems during field trials, by eliminating sub-optimal cell components from the process flow before they are integrated into stacks and systems.

4Sight has obtained funding to develop a range of flexible automated vision tools to support the development of fuel cell manufacturing processes.  We have prototype tools ready for evaluation which use our new technology platform optimized for this application domain.  Although focussed on process development, the new tools are already capable of supporting full scale process monitoring and control.

We believe that developing process monitoring and control strategies in parallel with the manufacturing process will shorten the time to deliver reliable and economic fuel cell manufacturing processes.

4Sight is actively seeking further industry partners to assist in the development of fully integrated automatic visual process monitoring and control systems, and to maximise the benefits such systems can bring to the industry.