Leviathan Design, in the Melbourne suburb of Rowville, has designed, manufactured and installed an automated cell to bond metal trim and plastic columns to a glass panel to form a door outer assembly used in free standing household cookers manufactured by Electrolux Home Products in Adelaide.
The Adelaide factory, which employees some 450 people, produces around 1300 cookers per day including Electrolux, Westinghouse and Chef brand names.
Leviathan Design has in-house machining facilities capable of producing all components required for the system. These were designed in 3D CAD and the model was used directly by the company's CNC machines to produce the components. This ensured that the company had complete control from design through to the manufacturing process.
Sales engineer at Leviathan Design, Glenn Westonsmith, points out that the automated production cell designed for Electrolux is extremely compact, with seven ABB robots all working together in the one cell, which is very unusual.
"A critical requirement of the project was to achieve a cycle time of 14 seconds. A full computer simulation using ABB's Robot Studio software was used to show the proposed system capability," he said. "This simulation was continually updated and tested throughout the project to check the cycle time."
The oven doors are constructed of three parts: painted glass sheets supplied in stacks, plastic injection molded columns provided in trays, and powder coated or stainless trim placed by hand onto the conveyor. Main elements of the automated production system are the robot oven door bonding cell, overhead link conveyor, and the robot storage buffer.
A key task of the robot oven door bonding cell is glass separation and paper removal. The glass sheets tend to stick together due to vacuum between the sheets, but this issue was solved by gripping the glass stack so that the top sheet can be removed by robot without the second sheet sticking.
Paper removal is provided by a high velocity fan creating a vacuum to suck the paper away to a hopper. Westonsmith says it is critical that glass and trim is accurately aligned for assembly of the doors, so glass and trim are placed on 'air tables' to provide a frictionless surface.
"Small holes release air to provide a flotation cushion so that friction between the glass and the table is reduced to almost zero. This ensures that the glass and trim consistently align to a datum position," he explained.Click on their website careel-laser-engraving-machine for more information.
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