PRECISE DEBURRING

June 29, 2015 3:44 pm

At Heidenreich & Harbeck, KUKA robots remove undefined burrs in cast parts with the help of contour detection
 Since 1927, Heidenreich & Harbeck has manufactured sophisticated cast parts in Mölln. The company develops, casts and processes high-quality components in small and large series, according to the slogan “seamless quality”. At Heidenreich & Harbeck, customers can purchase ready-to-install cast components with a unit weight of up to 16 tons from one source. For this renowned company, Boll Automation has developed an automation solution, with which a robot-based, fully automatic post-processing process is enabled despite the undefined formation of cast burrs.
The core competencies of Boll Automation are robotics, measurement technology and automated surface inspection for turnkey testing and automation systems with visual 100 per cent inspection in production. “For Heidenreich & Harbeck, we concentrated on a fully automated post-processing system for deburring cast parts,” André Peters, Executive Manager of Boll Automation, explained. Foundries can benefit from a conversion from manual work to robot-based work: Be it extreme heat, the handling of liquid metal or extremely heavy weights, excessive dust, work areas with high humidity or flying chips in post-processing – the environment puts a strain both on humans as well as on the machine and requires maximum robustness. On top of that, there are often great requirements with respect to product quality, reproducibility, flexibility in production, quantity and cycling.
“So far, the undefined formation of cast burrs has made a robot-based automation in post-processing more difficult or partially even impossible at Heidenreich & Harbeck,” André Peters said. He added that, with the solution found now, they have successfully mastered this challenge. The KUKA foundry robot mounted on a console at Heidenreich & Harbeck is equipped with a number of processing units for cleaning  or polishing the cast burrs. Once the burr is determined accurately, the robot starts with the precise post-processing with great reproducibility.

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