Feature Robotics & Motion Control A mix of the old and the new
Combining the latest technology with the heritage craft of barrel making, Kawasaki has supplied two robots and a purpose designed lathe as part of the refurbishment process of traditionally built oak barrels at Speyside Cooperage in Alloa, Scotland
utes to change the lathe tooling which comprises a cone on each tailstock. “When the decision was made to refurbish by ‘dropping both ends’ we assumed that the process time would be extended above the existing ‘one end’ manual operation. In fact the new process is far quicker. The system effectively increases our capacity - subject to feeding it enough barrels,” continued Langland.
peyside Cooperage manufactures and refurbishes over 100,000 oak barrels a year in its two factories at Speyside and Alloa. Although maintaining the craft skills demanded by the manufacturing process, the business is open to the implementa- tion of machinery where output and health and safety can be improved. Oak barrel refurbishment is an impor- tant part of the whisky industry. Previously used barrels, such as sherry barrels, are used for maturing whisky to provide unique flavours. In addition, often after a typical ten years without attention, barrels are well suited to being repaired for continued service. Meeting a growing trend to refurbish both ends (or heads), of a barrel as part of the refurbishment process, Speyside Cooperage went to specialists Aberlour Engineering. The brief was to design a system to automatically handle the process of removing up to 3mm from the barrels internal diame- ter and to handle it through a charring process after machining.
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Steven Langlands, manager of Speyside Cooperage, explained, “Traditionally the refurbishment process requires ‘dropping out’ only one end of the barrel using a lance burner and ‘scouring’ the inside of the barrel with a rotary wire brush. Increasingly our customers are requir- ing both ends to be removed and a shaving to be taken from the internal diameter to clean the surface. “With the barrel open at both ends it lends itself to a lathe operation which we specified to Aberlour Engineering. Using a lathe introduced a loading
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issue as some of the larger barrels weigh in excess of 100kgs.”
Bearing the load
Aberlour Engineering designed a hori- zontal lathe with powered tail stocks and two 300kg payload Kawasaki ZX300S Robots to load and unload the barrels. The load robot picks a barrel from an in-feed position and loads it into the horizontal lathe. After a barrel has been machined the unload robot removes the barrel, inverts it over a col- lector unit to catch the wood shavings and places it onto a conveyor. This con- veyor transports it through the charring process which has the effect of opening the newly machined wood grain to allow it to absorb moisture as part of the wood’s sealing process.
After the charring process the barrel is removed by the Kawasaki robot and placed onto an output conveyor. Using one gripper design for all four barrel variants, the system takes only 15 min-
New military servo drives E
lmo Motion Control has presented its ultra-high current Eagle servo drives at AUVSI 2013 in Washington.
With ratings of 150A, 300A and 600A, and operating voltages ranging from 16 to 96V DC, the newest Gold Eagle family members are specifically designed to meet the requirements of unmanned applications such as unmanned vehicles, turrets and other systems that require repeated power bursts for relatively long time periods. To enhance the compact Gold Eagle package with new ultra-high current specifications, Elmo combined its propri- etary power conversion technology together with an advanced pulse width modulation (PWM) follower algorithm. Elmo Motion Control
www.elmomc.com T: +972 3929 2377
“Also we could possibly have man- aged with a single robot, however, a conscious decision was made to have two - for future expansion of the process we would not require extra robots as we now have the potential for each robot to service two machines if they are mounted on linear axes.” The system requires one operator and if programming and maintenance train- ing is required in the future this will be provided by Aberlour Engineering and Kawasaki Robotics UK.
Kawasaki Robotics
www.kawasakirobot.co.uk T: 01925 713 000
Left: at Speyside Cooperage
automation and a heritage craft are working in harmony
Enter 211
Below: the two 300kg payload Kawasaki ZX300S Robots load and unload the barrels
Enter 212 OCTOBER 2013 Automation
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