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Solenoids > Application Examples: Industrial Machinery
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| Solenoids in Industrial Machinery |
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When a Western machine manufacturer evaluated the state-of-the-art in its industry several years ago, one thing was obvious. The electronics age had passed it by! In the age of PLCs and flat panel displays, they were still using gears, linkages, and cams controlled by the most rudimentary mechanical switch and relay panels.
Their product, a machine for automatically applying a liquid gasketing material, performed acceptably. Indeed, they had a lion's share of the market and enjoyed an excellent reputation within this small niche industry. Improvements were needed, however. The mechanical linkages and cams demanded very tedious set-up procedures by trained technicians. Furthermore, compound viscosity changes, which are common from lot to lot, required frequent tweaking of the dispensing valve. This, of course, necessitated production stoppage. Given multiple dispensing heads were located on the rotating carousel, getting identical results from each station was nearly impossible. As the dispensing orifices and linkages wore, the problems multiplied.
The solution seemed straightforward. Replace the mechanical actuation and control devices with electrically controlled actuators. The difficulty was finding the proper device that could open and close in one-tenth of a second with absolute repeatability, while at the same time enduring the acceleration forces encountered as the carousel spun at the dizzying rate of 250 RPMs to intercept the product.
Eventually, an electronic dispensing head was developed. The short stroke, high speed task of opening the valve fell to a Saia-Burgess flat face low profile solenoid. The extremely high pull forces generated allowed the valve to be closed with a very aggressive return spring, making compound flow cutoff precise and immediate. The high force-to-size ratio of the low profile solenoid also made the physical installation inside each dispenser quite easy.
Future developments will attempt to add sensors for detecting gasket line quality. This will allow the feedback loop to be closed, enabling the machine to make the proper adjustments independent of operator intervention.
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