Automotive lighting components have evolved into very technical and large products over the years. These components are typically always leak tested at the end of the assembly process to ensure that the housing will not leak and allow water or dust contaminates to ingress and cause electronic failures.

Production lines often run at a rate of 1-2 parts per minute. A common drawback to the leak testing station is larger sized (internal volume) head lamps can take up to 30 to 60 seconds to repeatably test. This can sometimes require the leak test station to have two leak testers and dual tooling which makes the station costs increase dramatically.

Manufactures will often try to shorten the leak test cycle time to keep up with the production rates which in turn causes false failures and unnecessary retesting of products because the repeatability of the leak test is not acceptable at the shortened cycle time. The key to this problem is the ability to repeatably leak test the components in the shortest amount of time. Reject any leaking assemblies, and ensure that false rejects (parts considered to leak by the leak test instrument that don’t actually leak) are prevented.