High-Speed Material Handling and Test Machine

This project was requested by a manufacturer with the purpose of improve a manual material handling and inspection process to an automated process. Our customer sought a machine to process sheets of buttons through a flow inspection and then to remove and collect the buttons from a sheet. By automating this process our customer expected an improvement in production and quality and a decrease in labor for the replaced material handling process.

The solution implemented by SDC consists of a flow test station, a punch station, and a machine vision inspection and alignment station. All the required assemblies are mounted to a machined heavy-duty steel frame engineered to precisely locate the assemblies and required no disassembly for shipping and installation.

During operation a stack of parts can be loaded manually by an operator. The machine will process all parts individually thru the cell until completion and the only operator involvement is conducting a necessary visual inspection. To efficiently process each sheet SDC implemented a 3-axis robot with a custom gripper arrangement to handle the sheets. This combination allows precision material handling as well as adaptability to manipulate the sheets of varying sizes and button layouts.

At the flow test station parts are positioned by the robot where the buttons are clamped and the flow of liquid thru the button is evaluated and characterized. Succeeding that each button is precisely located positioned and punched out. The punched buttons are collected in separate containers for each button.

The successfully implemented machine decreased the required labor for part process and improved the part quality as well as the throughput capacity while maintaining the required part quality standards.