Applications Library > Sheet metal plates

A special material supplier to the Aerospace Industry had to transfer heavy duty frames loaded with aluminium sheets having a total weight of 1,000kgs between four process tanks. The first tank was filled with a liquid salt solution heated to 650°C, the second tank was a quench tank to bring the temperature of the material down quickly. The third tank is a rinse tank and the fourth tank was a drier. The overall process cycle time was quite long at 10 minutes, but it was important to transfer the frame from the salt solution into the quench tank in less than 9.6 seconds,meaning that the system needed to move at 2 metres per second.There were also height issues to overcome. Read more ...

Robotic automatic welding is a proven way to improve quality while reducing cycle time. Vast working envelopes can be covered when robots are coupled with gantry systems to tackle the largest parts were long welds abound. The best performance is accomplished while welding 'in position', namely using the torch pointing down in order to take advantage of gravity. When parts are large and heavy, this task becomes challenging. Read more ...

Large parts that require manual racking have historically been the bottleneck on large press lines. So much so, they can actually dictate the speed by which production is run. The customer had a major problem with material handling congestion and ergonomic issues for the operators as they picked up parts from flat conveyor surfaces. The first goal of this program was to allow parts to be processed at more stations, while allowing fork truck traffic to flow smoothly. This was accomplished by dividing the exiting parts into additional racking stations and fanning out the turn tables to avoid material handling congestion. The second part of this goal was achieved by presenting the parts to the operators ergonomically to reduce the potential for injury. Read more ...

At the end of a production line for trueing and cutting steel plates, subsequent automatic stacking is required. The speciality of the production lies in the wide range of formats and the versatile, virtually simultaneous switch between the various dimensions of the batches. The dimensions range from 2 x 1 m to 2.13 x 16 m (plate thickness 2 -25.4 mm) and all the intermediate formats. The system is designed for a capacity per stacking station of 5 strokes per minute in normal operation or 10 strokes per minute in alternating operation. There are two stacking stations one behind the other. This doubles the stacking capacity of the system to 10 or 20 strokes per minute, respectively. The maximum vertical stroke is 900 mm, the horizontal travel from the pick-up position to the stacking station is 3,500 mm. Read more ...

Palleting up to 20,000 randomly placed indexable inserts in a very small area as well as workpiece-aligned loading and unloading of a Junker grinding machine.
Cycle time: 20 sec.
Workpiece exchange time in the machine: 4.0 sec.
Workpiece weight: approx. 0.03 kg – 0.20 kg
Workpiece dimensions: approx. Ø 5.0 mm - Ø 25.0 mm to approx. 10.0 mm – 35.0 mm Read more ...

At the end of a production line for aligning and cutting aluminium plates, subsequent automatic stacking is required. The speciality of the production lies in the wide range of formats and the versatile, virtually simultaneous switch between the various dimensions of the batches. The dimensions range from 1 x 1 m to 3.15 x 15 m (plate thickness 2 ? 15 mm) and all the intermediate formats.
The system is designed for a capacity of 5 strokes per minute in normal operation or 10 strokes per minute in alternating operation. The maximum vertical stroke is 900 mm, the horizontal travel from the removal position to the stacking station is 3500 mm. Read more ...

A manually operated manufacturing line for insulated sheet metal panels has to be automatized maintaining the flexibility in regard of the broad product range. Panels ranging from 1x1 foot in size up to 4x8 foot have to be assembled from two blanks bent on press brakes and an optional layer of insulation material. A competitors proposal uses standard market solutions with a transfer system. The high cost and low flexibility of this alternative result in tipping the scales on the GÜDEL side. Read more ...