WOW, That’s A 3 Axis Servo Robot Arm Disposable Spoon Paper Box Automation Solution
October 10 ,2018 editor in charge:Carmi.CC  1

图片名称

After one years’ hard working in CNC department, I got a internship position in the sales department of SWITEK and the first lessen to be a sales is: To visit the workshop of our client with colleagues from SWITEK after sales department and study the installation and trial run of a new cutlery automation system.  

 图片名称

The company visited today is an export oriented enterprise who is specialized in the production of disposable cutlery with a history of more than 40 years. Since the first SWITEK robot introduced in year 2010, they’re now one of our key accounts with more than 30 robots and 6 sets of cutlery automation system working in their workshop.

 图片名称

The system for trial running today is a 3 axis servo robot arm cutlery paper box auto-packing system. Most of the installation works had been done and for today it’s a trial running and minor adjustment to the parameters for finial optimization of the system. It’s Mr. Liu from the Electrical control department who has more than 20 years’ experience in injection molding automation system programming and had been working in SWITEK for more than 5 years. He witnessed the birth of the first cutlery automation system and the on coming development of SWITEK cutlery automation technology. In the past 5 years, Mr. Liu took part in the programming and installation of more than 100 sets of cutlery automation system. For a better understanding of the system, Mr. Liu explained the design idea of the cutlery automation system to me in detail.  

 

This is a classical designed SWITEK dual 3 axis servo robot arm, dual collector and cold runner 28 cavities rectangular mold cutlery automation system. With optimized eject pin design, the sprue and the spoons would be separated in mold automatically. In this system, the first 3 axis servo robot arm will have the spoons picked out from the mold, let go the separated sprue and have the spoons well stacked on the first collector. The two collectors will shift their position automatically. The second will have the well stacked spoons moved to the packing machine to be box packed, while the first robot will continue to stack the spoons on the empty collector. The process from the picking to box packing would be done automatically without human interference. Mr. Liu told me, before the installation of the cutlery automation system, each injection molding machine will need at least 3 staffs to do the collecting and packing work. With SWITEK cutlery automation system, each staff will be able to take care of at least 3 injection molding machine. With increasing labor cost, the economic sense of the cutlery automation system is considerable.

 图片名称

Regarding the difference between the round mold and rectangular mold in a 3 axis servo robot arm, Mr. Liu explained that a 3 axis servo robot arm can do linear movement only, and a rectangular mold will fit this character of a 3 axis servo robot better. The rectangular mold will help to simplify the structure of the the cutlery automation system, reduce the production cost and make the installation and maintenance of the cutlery automation system easier. A rectangular mold make it possible to have a 3 axis servo robot arm to move the well stacked spoons to the packing machine instead of an articular robot to reduce the production cost of the cutlery automation system. A rectangular mold will also help to optimize the efficiency of the cutlery automation system.

 

In the same workshop, I saw another cutlery automation system delivered in 2016 which is a 28 cavities 28 cavities stack mold disposable forks automation system. Different from the paper box auto-packing system on trial, this system has a much more complex structure. To optimize the productivity of the stack mold injection system, a side entry dual arm picking design was adopted which will have a much shorter in mold time compared to the top entry 3 axis servo robot arm solution. For the fast shifting of 4 collectors, 2 sets of wave shaped rails are introduced into the system which will help the shifting of each two collectors in second.  

  

The visiting of the factory finished soon. I didn’t realize that I know very little about injection molding automation before I in a highly automated workshop of injection molding. For a better future of both SWITEK and myself, I’ll work harder to learn more technology of injection molding automation.



    TOP