Rapid optical inspection of bubbles in the silicone rubber

Silicone rubber mold is frequently used in the indirect tooling of rapid tooling technology. Defect inspection of silicone rubber after degassing process using vacuum machine is usually evaluated by visual inspection. The drawbacks of this method include human error, time consuming and exhaustive. An optical inspection system for inspecting the bubbles in the silicone rubber is developed in this work. Bubbles in solid silicone rubber or liquid silicone rubber can be easily inspected with high accuracy in the millimeter range by studying the peak intensity distribution profile of He–Ne laser radiation passed through the silicone rubber.