Design of Air Cooling Housing for Image Sensors Using Additive Manufacturing Technology

Machine vision is widely used in industry for monitoring and inspection. In additive manufacturing technology (AM), it is especially important in that it can cover an entire 2-dimensional printed surface area instantly. Additionally, AM technologies can also be used to make a mechanical part for a machine vision system such as mount or illumination devices on a 3D printer. For the industrial 3D printer, the camera mount requires to have temperature control capabilities for the vision system. This research aims to develop a method to build a mount with cooling capability with AM technology. This paper introduces a 3D printed camera cooling housing and proposes a temperature feed-back control method based on the image sensor itself without adding a thermal sensor to increase the user friendliness and simplicity. In the demonstration, a camera cooling housing that was developed enabled a camera module to operate at 200°C in an industrial Fortus 400 (Stratasys, MN).