Industry: Manufacturing

Services and Materials Provided:

• Motoman six-axis robot
• Controls system design and control panels
• End of arm tooling
• Robot programming
• PLC and HMI programming
• Project management
• Start-up

Situation Analysis

Since it is not possible to manufacture refrigeration coils in a single program cycle on conventional coil bending machines, the Customer was looking for a more flexible bending system which would at the same time provide outstanding precision, process reliability and ease of operation.

Technical Details

Applied Technologies designed, programmed, and installed a complete robot cell to meet this customer’s needs.  A Motoman six-axis robot with a 100kg payload was used for this application.   The robot functions as a fully automatic coil bending machine, which guides, depending on the specific task, from a few Bends to 100s of Bends for two coil diameters.  By executing the motions of a bending machine in the X, Y and Z axes, the robot uses up to three bending  planes to create various bends, elongations and twists.  The robot fetches the tube/coil, moves through the X, Y and Z coordinates under servo control and, thus with high precision, operates the bending head end of arm tooling.  The robot grips the tube/coil at defined points coming off of a coil straitening machine and rotates one of the outer ends of the tube/coil to create the bends.  

The positioning accuracy of the robot is to within a few hundredths of a millimeter.  In addition to this very high repeatability, a primary advantage of the robot is its flexibility, since unlike a tube/coil bending machine it can also make coil configurations from a recipe list versus running the same configuration in a batch mode.

Compared to conventional tube bending machines, with Robot the user can choose the number and position of the bending head to create a wide range of bending configurations. This flexibility makes it possible to change over production quickly, even when manufacturing difficult parts and automatic production is possible for even the smallest batch sizes – providing a lasting boost to productivity and cost-effectiveness.

To make operation easier, Applied Technologies paid particular attention to development of the software. This benefits the set-up personnel who can program the sequence via a programmable logic controller, visualized by means of a PC with Windows user interface.  The software also keeps track of coil being used to maximize the material and reduce waste.

The uninterrupted nature of the robotic processes means that manual bending or finish-bending operations are also unnecessary. Since these potential sources of errors have now been eliminated, today the customer achieves higher quality.