Launch announcement for Fastener Integrity Monitor (FIM)

• FIM is now commercially available

Product Overview

Catalyst’s Fastener Integrity Monitor (FIM) is the newest, most innovative approach to early warning and detection of faulty bolted joints before they become a financial or business continuity liability to the manufacturer. 

Because modern day electronically controlled torque installation systems are far from perfect in consistently delivering sufficient clamp force in tightened bolted joints, manufacturers’ continue to deal with the very large financial impact of warranty claims for their products as well as the client satisfaction levels.  These torque installation systems have greatly advanced over the past 15 years; however, they have seemingly reached the upper limit of their technical capabilities in compensating for the changing conditions, within the production/assembly environment, that directly contribute to the improper tightening of bolted joints at installation. Because conditions occur for which the torque installation systems can not compensate to achieve adequate tightening and because these systems cannot detect or alert when such conditions have affected final bolted joint quality, final product reliability is negatively impacted as evidenced by high levels of consumer-generated warranty claims caused by premature bolted joint failure.

FIM is designed and developed to screen each and every tightening process within the manufacturing cycle of a final product to determine if conditions have shifted enough to cause a reportable deviation from the engineering specifications. This means that, with FIM deployed within a single plant or a global corporation, every bolted joint that could cause warranty impact with premature failure is being analyzed for reportable deviations before the product leaves the build process and definitely before a potentially faulty final product is shipped to the customer.

FIM is software-based tool which resides on a networked server within the manufacturing plant. FIM is capable of receiving completed torque data packets from a variety of sources including the devices themselves that exist on the plant network or in the manufacturing cloud.  FIM is a very comprehensive, user friendly system that allows simplified establishment and maintenance of relevant engineering specifications, detection pattern profiles, alert profiles of which all make up the basis for the live, active screening and detection processes within FIM.  Once torque application devices are configured and enabled within FIM, the FIM system will begin to automatically process torque data imports, open/initiate data records, mathematically analyze the resultant torque/angle curve for key tightening characteristics, run comparative analyses of the calculated results with engineering specifications for every received rundown packet, in real time.

Whether the manufacturing plant has only one critical torque application station or hundreds of them throughout the end-to-end manufacturing cycle, FIM will import, analyze and issue any necessary alerts for user-defined detection pattern violations within seconds of the actual tightening process, for each and every tightening operation.  FIM’s processing and throughput performance is enabled by its system design/architecture, optimized algorithms and advanced data handling techniques.  If data volumes, data retention periods, recovery performance and intra-plant access of data are factors in the overall system design, FIM is internally featured with an advanced cloud management system that maximizes data management and accessibility.

FIM is truly an advanced quality ‘watchdog” for the quality teams, centrally located expert teams and management teams who understand the imperfections of modern day torque application systems and have an objective of improving final product reliability and reduce warranty cost impact.  FIM deploys a complete, user configurable detection pattern and alerting system that allows the fastener engineering team to set the definitions of impacting deviations within the tightening process and to set the frequency of detection before alerts are generated.  When conditions occur that violate the configured deviations and detection patterns, designated staff will receive a detailed alert via email or SMS.  The alerted staff will then be able to enter the unique Alert ID number and instantly view the rundown records that caused the violation and subsequent alert.  This allows instant viewing of the torque/angle curves for final scrutiny by advanced technical, expert staff before initiating intervening actions.

With a 100% sampling rate of a known quality vulnerability point that operates hands-free without impact to current operational process, FIM offers one of the strongest value propositions in the market today. 

1. Early detection of a high probability failure point evidenced by the level of warranty claims directly attributed to the premature failure of bolted joints.
2. Install, configure and launch as a hands-free screening system that automatically alerts designated staff based on user defined deviation criteria and detection patterns.  No changes to current production processes, operator actions or  support activities are necessary to gain the benefits of FIM.
3. Optimizes centralized expert teams by performing the sampling and analysis of live production data to determine the need for expert review and plant intervention.
4. Advanced data management that supports fault isolation and root cause analysis without additional effort from valuable expert teams and support teams
5. Advanced SPC processing and analysis that improves predictable failure analysis

Contact the Catalyst sales team for more information or to arrange a demonstration of FIM.