Meeting the Challenge - Heat Treat Oven Racking of Brake Rotors скачать в хорошем качестве

Meeting the Challenge - Heat Treat Oven Racking of Brake Rotors

The Problem: A Tier 2 automotive supplier realized they had a process for heat-treating brake rotors that could greatly improve through the use of automation. The process involved high amounts of manual labor, resulting in safety and ergonomic issues and cost inefficiencies. The manual process: Using the manual process, each rotor had to be loaded onto a rack, put into a furnace, and then unloaded from the same rack. Each rotor weighed between 15 and 45 pounds. Each rack was designed to handle 75,000 pounds. Each Furnace held six racks for a total of 450,000 pounds of brake rotors. Each cycle required the rotor to be handled twice. Six total furnaces with a heat time of 23 hours meant that 5,400,000 pounds of steel needed to be handled each day of production. The Goal: • Eliminate the need for operators to load a 6 foot by 3-foot rack by hand • Reduce cost long term • Design a system that would integrate easily and be flexible across product families The AMT Solution: A fully automated and integrated robotic brake rotor loading cell. This cell incorporated the following items: • Operator lift assist device. • Conveyance to move rotors from outside the cell into the robot safety zone. • Heavy-duty turntable to rotate the two-sided rack. • Fully integrated controls to interact with the plant host system. • Robot material handling robots - FANUC R-2000B. • Robot integrated vision systems to find the rack “arms” and the brake rotor itself. • System safety fencing and RIA compliant operator interface points. • Vision lighting, color lighting, and filters to utilize certain bandwidths to eliminate ambient light harming the system. The Resulting Benefit and Cost Savings: • The system allows each operator to process twice as many rotors per day • The manual lift assist eliminated the requirement for any operator to manually lift any parts • The solution easily adapted across multiple product families • The solution communicated via PLC, Ethernet technology, allowing for easy integration to the prevailing plant floor automation and across other plants, and • The automated solution allowed the customer to redesign the brake rotor rack for greater efficiency and furnace throughput Applied Manufacturing Technologies (AMT) is a full- scale automated solutions provider with three core business lines: System build and integration, consulting for automation readiness, and turnkey industrial controls. AMT has the capabilities to help customers at every step of the automation journey, from front-end consulting and concept and design iteration to build and field startup. Key to the corporate mission is helping customers find the right solution to their specific challenges. We are an authorized FANUC systems integrator. For more information visit http://www.appliedmfg.com