Future of Manufacturing

Exceptional cooling to ensure best possible welding results

In the picture:The ArcTig welding process from Fronius achieves high welding speeds and outstanding weld seam quality. When welding, it is not only seam quality that matters, speed plays a significant role too. Both of these help the welder to work more efficiently and so reduce costs. With the modified TIG process, ArcTig, Fronius has developed an innovation for mechanised joint welding that addresses these requirements. A special welding torch allows the TIG arc to be focused in a targeted manner and its energy density is significantly increased. Users can weld up to ten-millimetre-thick, high-alloy sheets and pipes without extensive seam preparation, to an exceptionally high quality standard and much quicker. The ArcTig welding process is based on the principle of tungsten inert gas welding, or TIG welding for short. In this process, an arc burns between a non-melting tungsten electrode and the metallic workpiece in an oxygen-free, reactionless gas atmosphere. The current flow heats the electrode, resulting in an electron flow. This reduces the combined resistance, producing a soft, wide arc. The inert protective gas shield means there are no chemical reactions with the liquid weld pool. This enables users to produce a perfect weld-seam appearance without tempering colours and spatter as well as the best weave pattern. TIG welding is suited to a variety of different materials and applications, including tricky materials like titanium. The ArcTig welding process is designed for applications in container and pipeline construction, in the manufacture of turbines and the construction of special machines, cranes and tanks. The key innovation here is the optimised welding torch with an electrode clamping system, which enables the electrode to be cooled right to the tip. This increases the combined resistance and creates a high arc voltage. Electron emission now takes place over a small area but at […]

Compressed air expert lays foundation for further growth

BOGE managers look towards the future with optimism (from right to left: Wolf D. Meier-Scheuven, Michael Rommelmann, Gavin Monn, Ricarda Fleer and Thorsten Meier. Future investments, awards and new business models – the Bielefeld-based family-owned company BOGE can look back on a year full of high points. In 2017, the company was in step with its international customers once again with its advanced compressed air solutions. One highlight of the year was the opening of the smart factory at the head office in Bielefeld. Since September 2017, high speed turbo technology has been in series production there. The new “continuous improvement programme” was awarded a prize. This progressively enhances the compressors via ongoing further development in customer deployment. The mechanical engineering company is the first to bring this solution onto the market. Classic maintenance is therefore a thing of the past. BOGE has been synonymous with forward-looking compressed air solutions through intelligent engineering for 110 years. Its anniversary year saw the opening of the smart factory, and the company creating the preconditions to fulfil the high demands of individual customer compressed air solutions even better. In the digitalised factory, people, component and machine communicate with one another to produce the parts for the prizewinning BOGE HST high speed turbo compressor, specifically for the customer and to zero error quality. “Achieving this production line represented a major challenge for us”, says Wolf D. Meier-Scheuven, the managing partner. “Thanks to the advanced production technology we are now in a position to manufacture in many versions and with process reliability. This is innovative and demonstrates our response to the continuously increasing requirements of our customers.” In 2017, BOGE invested more than five per cent of its turnover in research and development; around twice as much as the average invested by companies in the […]

The Ford plant closure is sad loss of manufacturing know how

Geoffrey Brooks, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Future Manufacturing), Swinburne University of Technology The closure of Ford’s casting plant in Geelong does make you wonder how losing the ability to make our own engines can be a step forward. Australia should take stock and contemplate what kind of society we are becoming. Critics of the decision to allow the car industry to leave would argue that governments should subsidise their local car manufacturing industries because of the benefits the industry brings in terms of employment and raising the general technological level of that country. In An Economy is not a Society, Dennis Glover argues that we are making a tremendous social and economic mistake in allowing such industries to close in the name of global competition. Glover outlines how the support for manufacturing in the post second world war era provided a base for many ordinary people to lead better lives, leading to many positive social and economic outcomes. He argues that the type of economy we have developed since the 1980s favours a few over the many. Certainly, the current government has shown more enthusiasm for making submarines than it did for car manufacturing, how does that extraordinary $50 billion dollar investment stack up, in terms of jobs and flow on effects? With the closing of the automotive industry, our knowledge of metals casting will clearly dive. Those employed at Ford and similar employees at Toyota and Holden don’t have equivalent jobs to take their deep knowledge to. The opportunities in the metals industry in this country are thin on the ground. The large casting plants are now in Asia, though the high technology end still prospers in part of Western and Northern Europe. The Chinese are currently known more for the low value end of metal castings but they are likely to […]

ALMA sheetmetal software – More profitable nesting for PALFINGER

Every year PALFINGER processes around 20,000 tons of high-tensile steel panels to manufacture loading cranes and other loading and hoisting equipment. Off-cut optimization is therefore a key concern shared by the whole management team in the company. Thanks to Alma’s act/cut software, the sheet metal plates to cut can be automatically nested in half of the time with minimized off-cut. “The fact that Alma is internationally established has been a key criterion when we decided to choose act/cut software… Today, act/cut has become our group-wide nesting standard solution” “The software was not only faster but also almost as efficient as an experienced user… We estimated time savings of 50 percent throughout all plants” The more little parts of different geometry are contained in the nesting orders, the higher the off-cut. When processing big parts, we sometimes have considerably less than 20 percent”. To minimize the off-cut rate orders may be over-nested. If there is still some space left on the panel, the system places additional parts beyond the scope of the order. In addition to that orders may be declared as filler parts, in order to fill panels showing voids where necessary. Alma has programmed these additional functions especially for PALFINGER. Time savings of more than 50 percent The users have become much more efficient thanks to the automatic nesting with act/cut. “Orders, which were formerly manually nested by an operator during his working time, today barely take one third of the operator’s time. We estimated time savings of 50 percent throughout all plants”. Thanks to the time savings, PALFINGER is able to process with the same team much more nesting orders than in the past and accept special tasks, which can’t be automated as easily. The probably most important benefit from the company’s point of view is the stability […]

Hello Industry 4.0

The newest member of the KUKA robot family – the LBR iiwa lightweight robot At the KUKA booth, the visitors of this year’s Hanover Fair can deal with the increasing digitalisation of production and cooperative network of employees and machines. As Europe’s leading supplier of industrial robots and automated production systems, KUKA directly participates with its products and services in the fourth industrial revolution – Industry 4.0. Therefore, robots will be the defining component for industry in the future – while the human takes centre stage. Sustainable automation concepts can only be developed with efficient, flexible and first of all safe production systems respecting the needs of the production staff. KUKA will not only present ways in which KUKA products can improve competitiveness, but also prove its compatibility with the digital world. Across the more than 1000 square meters of space in the Industrial Automation area, KUKA will be presenting innovative solutions that have one key characteristic in common: they are all designed to meet the requirements of Industry 4.0 and bring flexibility in the utilisation of production capacity, in logistics, in the sustainable use of resources. KUKA achieves this by merging the IT world and conventional high-tech industry solutions into complete Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS). In order to react in a flexible manner, to control process data streams from complex networks around the globe and to network digital controllers from different systems, interfaces based on Mainstream IT infrastructure are essential. This was already a key concept at KUKA in the mid-90s when it brought the first PC-based robot controllers onto the market. Subsequent KUKA innovations and developments also followed this core concept of simple integration. With the newest member of the KUKA robot family – the LBR iiwa lightweight robot and the controller Sunrise designed for direct cooperation between […]

How being open can give manufacturers the innovative edge

Tesla Motors’ decision last year to make all of its patents open to outside use has turned the industry on its head. By Stefano Picozzi, PaaS business development manager, Red Hat A/NZ Most industries are affected by disruption from technology so, to remain competitive, organisations need to keep up. Technology advances affect manufacturing, in particular. The industry is changing quickly, and the manufacturers that continue to prosper are those that keep pace with technology. Industrial solutions such as automation, resource management systems, and high-speed industrial design processes have helped manufacturers become far more agile and productive than they used to be. A manufacturer can only be as innovative and agile as the software on which these industrial solutions rely. However, not all software is created equal. The bulk of software solutions used in this industry is proprietary; owned, managed, and developed by a single company. This means new developments can be slower when it comes to innovation and best practice. Open source software, by comparison, is not owned by any single organisation; it is the result of a global community of millions of programmers. Because of the open and collaborative nature of this sort of software, with many minds contributing to its development, it can keep up with the agility and innovation that industry now demands. Organisations in many areas of business are increasingly seeing the value in the open source approach. The automotive sector is a good example. Digital design and automated manufacturing means developing a new car now takes a fraction of the time it used to. Tesla Motors’ decision last year to make all of its patents open to outside use has turned the industry on its head. Tesla made this unprecedented move in the hope that it would help drive the adoption of electric car platforms. […]

Robotic CNC plasma beam machine eliminates manual coping

Traditionally, beam coping has been done manually by marking the dimensions for coping on the workpiece as per the drawings and then manually cutting out the cope from the steel beam using oxy-fuel gas torch. This method leaves a rough cut requiring considerable chipping and grinding to improve the finish. Coping machines provide high speed and quality, eliminating all the drawbacks of manual coping. While there are many different machines from well-known overseas manufacturers on the market, Brisbane-based Advanced Robotic Technology (ART) has studied the needs of every steel fabrication shop in Australia, from small to large, in order to develop an automated, versatile machine, giving steel fabricators around the country a competitive edge; not only by creating an efficient automated machine made by ART in Brisbane, but also by offering local service and support. With a footprint of 3750 x 3600 mm, Metaltek XB offers full 4-sided plasma processing for the steel fabrication industry, advanced CNC robotics, high-definition plasma cutting and in-house developed user-friendly software and control interface. Moreover, 3-axis material handling conveyor systems and cross-transfer conveyors for load and unloading eliminates a large percentage of lifting, flipping and moving of steel members between machines. The operator simply prepares the next length of steel for loading while the previous one is cutting. A tick box on the touchscreen lets the controller know that the next length is ready to load. The drawbridge is able to extend 2.5 metres into the cutting envelope to support the material, clamp and draw for hitch feeding, and roll out the finished part. The drawbridge feed and synchronised rollers are both servo controlled to ensure highly-precise material feeding. The CNC controller can also automatically feed the next piece of material from the cross-feeds onto the in-feed roller conveyor for automatic cutting. Inside the cell […]

Your company’s visionaries are wrong about the Internet of Things

Slowly but steadily, pressure is building for industrial companies to come to grips with the fact that technology-enabled disruptive change is coming. This creates tension in most companies, because the culture in many industries is quite conservative when it comes to innovation. Product designers may be keen to innovate in their traditional areas of expertise, yet still be reluctant to consider new designs that rely on software and enhanced connectivity. Production groups find it difficult to justify even the time it takes to consider new ways of operating, and making do with aging production systems and techniques is the norm. So when a company’s visionaries talk about ‘Internet of Things’ or ‘Industrie 4.0′ or other terms for technology-enabled digital transformation, they are taking a risk. But are they right? To be sure, there’s plenty of hype in the market. It’s easy to find incredible claims about “xx billions of connected devices” or “yy trillions of dollars.” On the other hand are the naysayers who dismiss the trends saying “we’ve been doing it for years” or “we’ll never do that.” You can even find surveys from respectable firms that say “half of manufacturing executives don’t know about IoT” or some other comforting statistic. We’re not the only ones, you think. Maybe it’s not real. And if it is, it looks like I’ve got plenty of time to figure it out. Wrong. That building pressure comes from the growing gap between two forces: The exponential growth of computing technologies, and the linear thinking and inertia of humans and human systems. And that pressure is akin to tectonic pressure building at a fault line: the changes are barely noticeable for a long time, until a seismic shift unleashes a massive change. This pressure derives from what Ray Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating […]

How Life Cycle Engineering can make manufacturing more competitive

By Professor Sami Kara Director of Postgraduate Research Faculty of Engineering University of New South Wales Manufacturers in New Zealand and Australia are hearing a constant refrain: to remain competitive in the global manufacturing marketplace, companies must become more productive with fewer resources and must find ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. As well as becoming more ‘lean’ there is increasing pressure to become more environmentally sound. The answer, according to our research at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, could be Life Cycle Engineering (LCE). LCE is an approach to product design and manufacture that takes into account the entire product life cycle from beginning to end. With increased resource scarcity there is an opportunity for manufacturers to minimise their environmental impact and improve return, by controlling the entire product life cycle. This is a dramatic departure from the traditional manufacturing approach, which generally concerns itself with the product’s life cycle only up until the end of its warranty period, which has resulted in a disposable society, where many products are simply sent to landfill. The world has limited resources to sustain production. Approximately 89 million barrels of oil and liquid fuels were consumed per day worldwide in 2011 . By 2030 China alone is expected to consume 17.5 million barrels per day . Limited copper resources will cause similar issues. With this increased pressure on resources, manufacturers will eventually have to find alternatives to using high levels of raw materials. If products were designed from the beginning to be dismantled at the end of their lifespan, it would make the recycling process much easier and more cost-effective, and significant resources would not be wasted. LCE would go some way to addressing this issue but to be truly viable it must […]

First on-machine switch simplifies network design

Rockwell Automation has announced the launch of the Allen-Bradley ArmorStratix 5700, its first on-machine switch. Built with ruggedised IP67 protection, the Layer 2 managed industrial Ethernet switch can be mounted directly onto a machine or application, reducing the overall size and cost of a control cabinet, and shrinking the machine footprint. In many applications, cabinet space for system-level networks is limited or nonexistent. The ArmorStratix 5700 switch expands the Allen-Bradley On-Machine offering from Rockwell Automation – an industrially hardened portfolio of products that requires no cabinetry – and leverages pre-configured, quick-connect systems and simplified wiring layouts to reduce installation, troubleshooting and maintenance activities.” The ArmorStratix 5700 managed switch advances connected enterprise goals by delivering integration of machine-level data that, due to cost or location, would otherwise remain isolated from business-level systems. Using the Cisco IOS network infrastructure software, this switch manages the transfer of production data to enterprise-level databases and information systems for improved decision making. Senior analyst with ARC Advisory Group comments: “Machine-mounted Ethernet switches with M12 connectors and IP67 ratings are very popular among machine builders. The new ArmorStratix 5700 switch is a joint Rockwell Automation-Cisco developed product that includes these features along with Cisco IOS. This robust, machine-mounted switch is a new development that should go a long way toward resolving the information technology/operational technology struggles in manufacturing plants today.” This industrial switch simplifies the design and development of machine-level networks through configuration and monitoring tools. These tools help enable easy setup and diagnostics from within the Rockwell Automation Integrated Architecture system – bridging the gap between IT and the automation engineer. The ArmorStratix 5700 Layer 2 switch offers high availability, Quality of Service (QoS), and automated monitoring to help simplify network optimization and convergence. The switch comes standard with 8, 16 and 24 fixed-port configurations, and […]

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Future of Manufacturing