Conveyors & Automation Major Projects

Russia
Kia Motor

Heat Treatment Handling System - Russia

A forging handling system for either baskets of 1500Kg or loose forgings. Through furnaces oil or water quench, annealing furnaces, transfer to shot blasters.

Furnace baskets with furniture are loaded on a powered roller system on load cells from a 10T moving base hopper. Forgings handled ranged from Ø75mm cast balls to 2M long a

	10T moving base sorting hopper on its back
	Rail mounted box tipper, 1.5T, receiving from a shuffle conveyor
	120Kw immersion heater to fit in top of quench tank. This is used at the start of the shift: thereafter each 1.5T of forging causes a heat surge of 6°C and a heat exchanger is used to cool the oil or water quench.
	One of the stainless steel catenery belts weighing 6T and driven at top and bottom by polygon drums to preserve the catenery and absorb the impact of the forging without damage.
	The main centre part of one of the quench conveyors. This stands on a lower 2M deep section with a drag conveyor to recover any deposited scale
	The base section of the quench tank. There is a flat grid to contain any large items but the scale passes through and falls down a 45° slope into a trough. The 180°trough is made of armour plate and has passing through it a 458 malleable chain with cast iron discs, in halves, which are sacrificial and bolted through the chain. This set up in our works was only a test: on site the drive with further vertical armoured tubing stood at floor level which is about 4M higher than in these photographs.
	Fitting the head drum was fun. We had recently had this factory built and raised the eves to specifically deal with these 2 quench conveyors; but we had forgotten about the drive units which needed more height.
	Joining the belts was even more fun. This needed an iron fairy to lift the 7T belts up as well as to pull the belt around its track before a man had to feed through the joining rods and fix the end castings.
	During manufacture our client decided that 2 X 20M sections of plain heavy roller conveyor should be made as accumulating conveyors. To achieve this a low cost we innovated 'the shuffle conveyor'. The principle is rather like the waiter pulling a table cloth of a table leaving the the crockery behind. Slowly hydraulically stroking the roller conveyors, carried on flanged wheels, forward and then quickly back moving the 1.5T boxes at a good gentle rate.
	A turn over unit stood between the Oil and Water quench tanks and tipped either left or right to empty the NiCr baskets into the quenchant with 1.5T of forgings
	This is a simple section of push conveyor which is armour plate topped with rails which locate in the bottom of the basket bases and are pushed hydraulically into furnaces.

Kia Motors - South Korea
Blanking Line loading into 6T stacks on powered trollets

	This blanking line handles handles and stacks thin steel sheets for car body skins. The stacks weighing up to 6T are collated and tamped onto heavy powered trolleys. These two trolleys are carried on rails mounted on scissor lifts which when full are lowered to floor level and powered out to be unloaded onto AGVs for pressing elsewhere. Steel sheets up to 4000 x 2000 are fed from the press at up to 130M/min. Some are rectangular and some are trapezoidal. They must not be scratched.
The telescopic conveyor is also magnetic and takes the blanks quickly onto the diverter. This photograph, in our works, shows the diverted on the left and the telescopic on the right. This extends and elevates into the press to a position on the tooling where the blanks can be received.
	The diverter receives the blanks and can either feed to the lower piler position or the upper one. This enables continuous production. There is a further provision for the diverted to be lifted at it lead in end so that offcuts can be loaded onto a scrap conveyor during set-up.
	This shows the feed in conveyor to the lower piler. These twin guards on the left are where the side tamping turnbuckle shafts are located...
	These drive the yellow side guides which nestle either side of the stack as it is formed.The two cylinders control the end tamping. The picture on the right shows the diamond rails which carry the end tamper with Vee'd wheels and the two screwed rods which deal with trapezoidal sheet angle. Via two servo motors and rotary encoders.
Front Piler	At the face of the press is the front piler which accepts blanks feed out in that direction. is on rails to move out of the way for tool changes.
	It too has a telescopic elevating feed in conveyor... ...and at the back is some heavy duty powered roller conveyor
	The yellow kit on the left is the guiding system opened out fully and square and also shown are the two tampers which can fold up to remove the completed stack.