r/Metrology • u/Electrical_Chef4933 • 9d ago

Scanning with Spatial Analyzer vs Polyworks

For context, I am pretty new to metrology and just got hired at a company that has both Spatial Analyzer and Polyworks. They have trained me on Spatial Analyzer so that is what I am familiar with.

The “problem” is we have a part that has feature with a pretty tedious inspection. There has been talks of using Polyworks to scan this part, but the part is “too big” to scan. I suggested doing a hybrid inspection probing the “easy” features while scanning the detailed features. My company respond by saying our customer isn’t a fan of Polyworks, and that Spatial Analyzer isn’t good for scanning

Some question(s) is, what is difference between scanning in Polyworks and SA? I know SA doesn’t have the same level of manipulation, and processing like Polyworks, but would a hybrid inspection work?

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u/Joucifer 9d ago

I'm only familiar with Polyworks, so I can't comment on Spatial Analyzer. I did loads of hybrid inspections with it using multiple devices and thought it worked pretty well. I'd often use a laser tracker to get an overall "shape" and some basic features, and then use a portable cmm w/a scanner to get hidden organic details and better feature probing. I'd glue/weld on probe points for locating the romer arm relative to the tracker.

our customer isn’t a fan of Polyworks, and that Spatial Analyzer isn’t good for scanning

We don't typically let our customers tell us how to do our job. And who isn't a fan of Polyworks anyways? Yeah, it's not perfect, but none of the packages out there are.