Komatsu Denshi Kinzoku Kabushiki Kaisha

Toshio Hayashida

Masato Moriya

Hiroshi Monden

Toshirou Kotooka

Tadayuki Hanamoto

A melt level or the gap between a melt surface and a heat shield is measured accurately irrespective of how the melt surface is. A laser beam from a range-finding unit is reflected by a scanning mirror and projected on a melt surface through an entrance window and a quartz prism in a chamber of a puller. After specular reflection, the beam forms a measurement spot in the bottom of a heat shield and scatters. Part of the scatter, after specular reflection at the melt surface (secondary reflection), passes through the prism, the entrance window and the scanning mirror to the range-finding unit. The range-finding unit carries out triangulation using the distance between a laser source and a photodetector therein, and the angle of incidence and the angle of the received laser beam.

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Hiratsuka, Japan

Toshio Hayashida