Application: Our customer is a leader in producing flow control valves for shot peening applications. In order to calibrate and verify their valves, they must run material through the valves and measure the amount of material that passed through them. Some of the valves are very large and require hundreds of pounds of material to be loaded for the test.
Solution: Global Controls designed a gripper to hold on to barrels containing up to 400 pounds of material, and a test cell to organize the various barrels as well as facilitate the testing and calibration of the valves. We programmed a robot to pick and place the barrels as well as pouring the material into the test fixture to keep sufficient levels available for the valve testing. A PLC was the cell controller. It kept track of the barrels in the cell inventory, and gave commands to the robot to run all of its routines in specific orders. In addition to the cell and robot control, the PLC also communicated with the valves themselves. Some valves were discretely controlled, and some were serially controlled. The PLC would prepare material for the test, then initialize the valve under test, run the test, and finally store the data into a spreadsheet that would be saved to a server.
What Products were used: The robot was an ABB IRB-6700 robot with a 500kg payload. The PLC was an Allen-Bradley CompactLogix using WAGO remote I/O over Ethernet/IP. The HMI used Allen-Bradley’s FactoryTalkView on an industrial PC. We used an Omron Safety Laser Scanner and light curtains to safeguard the cell while keeping the inner workings of the cell visible. Global Controls custom designed and built the test stands in our shop.