Material Handling

We designed this system for a large tube fabricator. Dedicated pallets are automatically queued, filled with tubes, then ejected from the system. This automation allows the manufacturer to load tubes immediately after cutting, eliminating handling and space for inventory. By tailoring the system design, we were able to use the customer's existing pallets.

We were asked by a company that manufactures non-woven materials to produce a specially designed pair of unwind and rewind machines. These machines allow a strip of material to be run, under controlled tension, through a lengthly process between the machines without interruption, each spool of product following the previous one without rethreading the area between the unwind and rewind. If this type of automation interests you, you may wish to view the quad strip unwind and rewind photo and story elsewhere in this gallery.

We built this system to help our customer transfer a large quantity of press plates in and out of a layup operation for producing copper clad laminate. Extreme care is taken in the design of the vacuum platen and the lift and lower cycle on the stacker to prevent surface damage to the highly polished plates. This system is also capable of high transfer rates and has multiple stop positions so that it can unstack and insert new plates while removing old plates to a stack without slowing the manufacturing process.

Weird looking thing, isn't it? This system, while unusual in appearnace, is a very high speed sheet rotator. It is part of a system that makes refrigerator evaporators from roll-bonded aluminum sheets. It is designed to be mostly mechanical in nature, as it is located now in Siberia, where high technology support is not readily available. This is actually a small part of a much larger line we designed and built which includes a large number of material handling stations as well as three complete cut-to-length lines, the entry conveyors of which are seen indistinctly in the uuper right corner of this photo.

A rather simple looking station which allowed our customer to quadruple their throughput. This is a tension controlled rewind, including a non-contact roll diameter sensor and manually adjustable cross-web positioning capability. We were able to design these stations to fit in about one-half the width of the existing equipment, allowing up to four times the existing production capacity without a major plant change. This system is part of a family of material handling equipment - you may also want to see the media unwind photo and story elsewhere in this gallery.

A rather simple looking station which allowed our customer to quadruple their throughput. This is a tension controlled unwind, including a non-contact loop controller, a tension controlled rewind for slip-sheet paper, and manually adjustable cross-web positioning capability. We were able to design these stations to fit in about one-half the width of the existing equipment, allowing up to four times the existing production capacity without a major plant change. This system is part of a family of material handling equipment - you may also want to see the media rewind photo and story in this gallery.

This machine is a successor product to an earlier design. It reflects the result of an ongoing partnership with one our best customers. Only the rewind half of the system is shown. These machines allow multiple strips of material to be run, under tightly controlled tension and at precise speed, through a lengthly process between the machines without interruption, each spool of product following the previous one without rethreading the area between the unwind and rewind. All speed and tension control is accomplished with non-contact sensors. If this type of automation interests you, you may wish to view the dual strip unwind and rewind photo and story elsewhere in this gallery.

This turnover is part of a larger system for cutting sheets of copper-clad laminate into panels. It features minimal floor space, a high rate of operation (about five seconds, sheet-to-sheet time), special soft handling and sheet support features, and also shifts the common edge of the sheet from left to right as the sheet is inverted (a feature that was needed in the large system that this turnover was designed for). Also note that most of the mechanics are below the conveyoing level of the product, helping to minimize contamination. You may wish to view some of the automation in the laminates section for further information.

Our customer, one of the largest manufacturers of plastic foam, asked us to automate the stacking of banded bundles of foam sheet and separating sheets into a larger package suitable for shipping. We incorporated two independent loader heads in order to handle both bundles and separating sheets simultaneously, speeding the process significantly over previous methods. The bundle loader is designed to accept a full range of sheet sizes automatically. The separating sheet loader uses a vacuum pickup head to accomodate an equal size range of separating sheets.

We designed this automation for slitting a non-woven web-fed product. The fibers of the product were of such small diameter that the slitter knives are manufactured to thickness tolerances in the millioneth-inch range and are operated with zero clearance between each knife pair. System elements include a torque controlled unwind station with a web edge tracking sensor to control wandering and track camber, a multiple-cut slitter with adjustable height upper arbor and blade-and-spacer style tooling, and a dual takeup multiple-strip rewind with torque control. The rewind is also designed to create tension on every strip individually, regardless of the quantity of strips being rewound, keeping all strips taut.

Automatic Tube Stacking and Handling System