Read the FULL case study here https://www.ljwelding.com/blog/ge-healthcare-cuts-mri-cycle-55-percent-halves-labor The customer's a large mul...
Read the FULL case study here https://www.ljwelding.com/blog/ge-healthcare-cuts-mri-cycle-55-percent-halves-labor The customer's a large multinational corporation, and they do produce a lot of medical imaging equipment. And they ship products all over the world. And they have a high requirement for regulatory compliance with their products. In this particular application, we're handling a five and half ton work piece. It's aluminum vessel, and involves customized material handling and adaptive welding to achieve the end result. It's a fully automated application in that the operator doesn't touch the work piece after he's loaded it into the machine. And he picks it up basically on the other side after the welds are complete. So with the client's existing process, they had a lot of material handling involving overhead cranes, so that's a lot of lifting overhead, which poses continuous safety risks and what not, rigging. And just the time to get a vessel into the air and onto a machine takes a lot of time. Also, the machinery that they needed to handle the workpiece, that alone, just to flip it, took a large component of their floor space. They also had some weld quality issues, and a lot of rework that had to be done to the weld. And they had a strong desire to move to a single flow production line. Their material handling problem, with all their overhead crane use, we eliminated by letting the machine handle the workpiece all through the cell. So now, instead of the operator having to pick up the workpiece with the crane, put it on a separate piece of equipment, tip it 90 degrees, and then take it off, and then put it into the cell, the cell does all of that. All the operator needs to do now is load the workpiece into the cell and hit load vessel. The rest happens. We automated their welding process because their existing process was very manual, and semi-automated actually, and it relied heavily on their operator's skill and just due diligence in their process. They had a lot of cleaning that was needed between passes on their welds. And the finished weld that they were producing required a lot of grinding after welding just to have it fit with the next pieces in their production line. What we provided as a solution was a robot capable of performing adaptive seam tracking on their welding. We used laser seam tracking for this application because aluminum doesn't provide adequate information for through-arc tracking, which is commonly used with steels. Laser seam tracking also allows for adaptation between weld joints and geometries so it could adapt to changes in the groove and position to achieve a consistent result all around. Less
