24 April 2013
The system was developed by Linkx Systems specifically to handle the heavy threaded steel couplings used in oil and gas industry. MP Eastern applies a surface treatment to the couplings to prevent the threads from seizing on assembly.The handling system is required to pick up the couplings after they have been treated, move them to a burnishing station so that the threads can be polished, then rotate them through 90º before dipping them in a water tank for cleaning and transporting them to a drainage platform where they are dried with an air jet.The weight of the larger couplings, the need to handle such a wide range of sizes, and the complexity of the required motions meant that a solution based on conventional handling techniques would have been uneconomic and inflexible. The company therefore recommended a solution incorporating a KUKA industrial robot.Linkx produced a handling system where all of the major axes of motion are provided by the robot. To provide an intuitive and convenient user interface, however, the robot’s automation systems are integrated with an overarching control system based on an Allen Bradley programmable controller.This arrangement has allowed Linkx to provide a recipe system for configuring the machine to handle different sizes of coupling, with the user subsequently able to select the required size simply a choosing the appropriate option from a menu displayed on a touch screen.The new machine has substantially increased throughput capacity compared with the manual handling previously used, allowing MP Eastern to keep up with the growth in demand for its services. In addition, much greater process consistency is achieved, which has virtually eliminated the need for costly and time-consuming rework operations.
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