- Uwe Geick
Interview with Uwe Geick, PHILIPS Innovation Services
Substantially higher performance with micro mounting assembly
PHILIPS Innovation Services (PInS) in Aachen, Germany, offers customized production plant for internal and external customers. Uwe Geick, Business Development Manager, describes in the interview the new system concept for micro mounting, which will be presented at the Motek fair for the first time. The substantially higher performance was provided by the implementation of Mitsubishi Electric’s iQ platform and components.
Mr. Geick, what makes the system concept of micro mounting new?
September 25th, 2012 - Micro mounting means the mounting of various small parts and is used in many industries.
- Micro mounting. Foto: Philips.
An example is the production of xenon lamps in the automotive industry. Various steps must be combined such as welding and laser processes, ultra-pure gas processes, highly accurate dosage of solid and liquid materials, coating processes and finally optical process control.
Similar process steps occur in pharmaceuticals industry, precision mechanics, medical technology and in the food and packaging industries.
Our new system concept is realized by a direct drive rotary indexing table that flexibly adapts to various such tasks.
The substantial speed increase is the second innovation of this new rotary indexing table.
What is this speed increase like?
The speed of the rotary indexing table has been increased from 100 to 180 cycles per minute. However, this substantially higher performance had to be realized without any impairment of quality.
Will this new micro mounting assembly be displayed at the Motek fair?
- The rotary indexing table will be at the Motek fair.
Yes, at the Motek fair we will display a sample application, i.e. an inline quality control system regarding leak detection of products and packages.
Such quality control is crucial for the durability of foods that had been packed in a protective atmosphere, it concerns the sealing of ampoules and syringes as well as the perfect functioning of brake modules in vehicles, just to give a few applications.
How could such a higher performance be achieved?
Three various factors had to intermesh.
The most important point was the size reduction. Only with reduced size such high cycles can be achieved. At the same time, however, no power losses may occur. We found out that the Mitsubishi components provide in particularly high-power despite their compact design.
A particularly fast synchronization of the operations is also necessary, faster than networking the components via open Ethernet. Here the iQ platform from Mitsubishi ensures via a backplane bus that such a fast communication among the components is provided.
And finally at the Motek fair, two SCARA robots are mounted overhead to space-savingly integrate into the rotary indexing table. They must perform their moves so fast that a consistently high clocking is needed. That is why the robots are likewise integrated into the iQ platform.
- The new direct-drive-rotary indexing table for micro mounting. Foto: Philips.
All components, the control system with two CPUs, the servo drives, the 4-axes-robots and the touch panel are exactly coordinated and integrated via the iQ platform. Only the intermeshing of these three factors enabled this increase of performance for us.
I want to stress again: the crucial point is to provide not only high and highest clocking but at the same time highest accuracy of the work procedures with smallest and complex products.
