ARM Automation was tasked with designing and delivering a highly custom, turn-key end-to-end production process for making wire mesh structures used for holding various types of hazardous granular materials used in the petrochemical industry.
Re-design of the customer’s product to facilitate cost reductions and automated manufacturing (DFM/DFA)
Design and development of various material handling systems, including grippers, multi-axis transfers and robots
Adaptive control of process parameters to compensate for material variations on the fly
Metals stamping and forming using a dynamically-adjustable die system
Development of unique and proprietary spot welding techniques in several areas
Vision inspection and robot/tool guidance
Complex, recipe-driven, batch-build production control software
Movement and containment of pyrophoric, toxic materials
Conveyance, metering and dispensing of abrasive granular materials
Containment and conveyance of pyrophoric materials in an inert environment
Layer palletization of products having mixed geometries
Inspect, Fill and Close Tooling
Module Build Line
These stainless steel modules can vary in size and geometry, fill and packaging and are produced according to a batch recipe to fulfill customer requirements. ARM designed and developed this system starting from a entirely manual process involving many scores of workers who were performing operations with hazardous materials and under challenging quality constraints. By working closely with our customer’s product design team, ARM helped to re-design several aspects of the product for automated production and through a multi-phased, risk-mitigating approach developed new ways of building this product in a fully-automated fashion.
Process steps involved forming, trimming and joining of formed stainless wire mesh cloth into variable length “sandwich” plates. Multiple plates are then stacked and joined using a series of formed spacer bars to complete a stacked module.
Once built, modules are then automatically loaded to an “intelligent vertical filling system” which delivers hazardous granulated materials through an environmentally contained feed system to a series of vision-guided filling head modules.
Inspected modules are then passed to a row of forming and sealing systems which close and weld shut each module, row by row. Modules are then transferred to a separate packaging area in which the custom profiles are first dipped in molten wax for passivation before being placed into custom pallet patterns and boxed for shipment.
