Sensor Products introduces the Topaq Advanced Imaging System, providing a unique perspective of the distribution and actual magnitude of stress between any contacting or impacting surfaces


Sensor Products introduces the Topaq Advanced Imaging System. Used in conjunction with Pressurex stress indicating films, Topaq provides a unique perspective of the distribution and actual magnitude of stress between any contacting or impacting surfaces. In general, any application involving stress between two objects could benefit from Topaq capabilities.

"Measuring pressure distribution and magnitude in components, tools and machines as well as determining effective placement of strain gauges and drawing pressure in dies," said Jeffrey Stark, Senior Technical Manager, "are some of the common applications using Topaq.

Automotive components (such as gaskets), electronics packaging applications, heat sinks and PCBs lend themselves particularly well to interpretation with this unique system".

"Unlike FEA, Topaq is a post-process interpretative system that actually collects stress and force data at the interface surface," Stark commented further.

"In many instances, Topaq can be used to confirm the results of FEA analysis.

Topaq has extremely rapid response time usually requiring no more than five seconds to render an image".

Some of Topaq's features include histograms of pressure levels, enlargement and reduction, pseudo-color and 3-D viewing modes, extensive smoothing, filtering and thresholding enabling integration of total area and magnitude of force.

Surface contact area down to 3 mils as well as multiple and single regions of interest can be compared and analysed.

A line scan function allows the user to assess narrow bands of stress over unusual or intricate shapes.

Another feature called Grid-Maker applies a user designated mesh overlay to an image and quickly assimilates the statistical data for each cell into Excel format.

A bicubic interpolation algorithm allows Topaq to enlarge an image without the usual increase in graininess that normally accompanies such function.

Each image and its accompanying statistics can be saved, printed and exported for analysis in other software packages.