Using Electronic Gearing to Increase Machine ThroughputLeroy Stanford, Sales Engineer, Yaskawa America, Inc.
Concept Automation, located in Carson City, NV is a design and manufacturing company specializing in a full line of labeling machines as well as custom designs. Concept's customer base of large OEMs typically private label Concept's equipment and then integrate the equipment into their individual lines. Concept's machines are virtually ubiquitous with installations in over 25 countries.
With extensive motion control experience, Concept Automation was already producing 7-axis machines in 1991 and was the first in the industry to utilize stepper motor label feed systems. They even designed their own multi-axis controller as no viable commercial offerings were available at the time.
Today, Concept Automation's equipment uses PLC controls and other commercially available motion controllers for easy serviceability and lower cost.
Delivering Improved Reliability
Recently, Yaskawa helped the company upgrade a design. One of their varied packaging lines includes a high-speed bottle label applicator. This design originally used stepper motors and even lower-end servos with gear reductions. A unique feature of Concept's design is the use of electronic gearing, which allows servo axes to be linked in a speed-proportional manner. This electronic gearing ratio can be modified for different bottle label sizes. (Shown right, industry's fastest inline pressure-sensitive bottle labeling machine with a speed rating exceeding 340 bottles per minute.)
Concept Automation was looking to improve their existing designs to offer greater reliability and increased throughput. One of the main ideas was to use a directly driven servo on an axis that was particularly high duty cycle. Eliminating a gearhead would reduce cost and improve reliability by reducing backlash and component wear. Yaskawa met with Concept Automation and viewed this as a perfect application in their core competency.
Yaskawa was able to provide two different servo lines: the lower-cost Junma series for axes that required speed control, and the higher-end, industry-leading Sigma-5 series servo on an axis that required sub 15 msec settling times and very high duty-cycle. This axis went from standstill to 600 rpm and back to zero in about 120 msec.
On-Site Support Key to Smooth Implementation
Yaskawa provided on-site commissioning support to ensure that the Sigma-5 axis and Junma axes operated at their peak performance. The full-featured Sigma-5 servo allowed Yaskawa and Concept Automation to observe the settling time in the SigmaWin+ analysis tool. It was of upmost importance that this axis reach its trajectory position in a certain window to avoid the label being stretched or binded. Settling time was able to be reduced to fewer than 10 msec. The class-leading update rate and vibration suppression features of Sigma-5 made this requirement easy to meet. ?
"We've been producing high-speed label applicators for more than 20 years and the Sigma-5 has significantly raised performance levels," said Concept Automation's president.?" Choosing a vendor able to provide us with servos at the price of steppers [Junma] as well as the high performance shown by the Sigma 5 has been a really good experience for us.? The great support shown by Yaskawa in getting the first line running has exceeded expectations."
After all was said and done, Concept Automation was able to deliver a machine to their customer with 12% greater throughput over previous designs. Furthermore, the installation and testing of the servo axes were done in a matter of days to weeks, which is an exceptionally rapid development time. As the saying goes, "time is money" and any increase in throughput translates quickly into savings.
