Recently, DCISIV Technologies were engaged to design and build a production machine to assemble plastic hemispheres. Previously an extremely manual labour intensive task, we designed and built a complete machine to complete this task including all mechanical, electrical, pneumatic, safety and process components. Truly a “last mile integrator”, this project tested all of our skills.

Hemispheres are loaded into the machine in “male” and “female” halves. The “male” half cut and flared in process. Halves are then picked, overlapping seal clipped, and placed by the SCARA robot and custom 3D printed end effector. The assembled unit is then spin-welded, requiring a high integrity seal without any porosity to hold pressure. Finally accept / reject sortation for completed product. The customer specification was to achieve <12 second cycle time with <2% error rate. FAT proved these results.

The project proved extremely challenging due to the tight tolerances, variability in raw material dimensions, abrasiveness of the raw material, many variables in spin welding and many other challenges. Together with our customer, DCISIV embraced all of the challenges and took this machine from concept to production. In this series we share some of the key elements of the machine that helped overcome some of these challenges.

The first of these offers a sneak peek of how we used Precise Vacuum Control Technology from Schmalz Australia to solve picking and placing hemispheres (utilising our custom made end effectors) and utilising the vacuum terminal to also provide parts handling error detection and a high degree of flexibility in fine tuning parameters.