AUTOMATION & ROBOTICS
WAREHOUSING, HANDLING & STORAGE
ROBOTS WITH REGENERATIVE BRAKING HELP TO REDUCE ENERGY COSTS
R
educing energy consumption in today’s highly competitive industrial environment is likely to be higher on most, if not all of today’s manufacturers’ agendas, especially due to current higher energy costs. With automation playing an increasingly important role in many applications maximising the efficiency of robots will be of significant interest across all manufacturing sectors.
Features such as regenerative braking can make a big difference to the efficiency of robots, recovering braking energy and feeding it back into the power grid without the need for additional hardware. Motion control and Robotics specialists YASKAWA has developed an important solution for the recovery of robot braking energy and offers this feature as standard on its larger Motoman robot’s with a payload upwards of 50kg.
Their latest YRC1000 robot controls are able to convert kinetic energy from the down and sideways movements directly into 400V AC at 50 Hz and feed in back into the grid. Depending on the movement pattern of the application, the robot’s energy requirements can be significantly reduced. In applications such as handling, palletising, joining and processing, industrial robots make many down or sideway movements during which the servomotors dissipate energy thereby potentially generating electricity. Up until now, in older or other robot models on the market, the resulting energy has been converted to waste heat by control technology through electrical resistance and lost to the environment. In the Yaskawa solution the electric energy is fed back into the operator network – without
the need for additional hardware so it can be re-used. The extent of savings obviously depends on the specific application and the robots individual movement patterns, although realistically savings ranging from 8 to 25% can be anticipated which may result in annual feed-ins of about 2,800 kWh, equivalent to around 1600 kg CO2 and £1200. This regenerative braking feature represents a unique technical solution with Yaskawa applying its experience as a leading global manufacturer of
drive technology including servo drives and control packages which can be specifically tailored to industrial robots. In addition, the slim and compact design of Motoman robots with low moving masses and fast application of brakes during movement intervals enables the active position control to be switched off when not in use which increase the potential for greater efficiency.
Motoman YASKAWA
www.yaskawa.co.uk
EXOTEC DEVELOPS SPEEDY SOLUTIONS FOR THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE I
n the world of automation, everyone is talking about disruption. Exotec tries to differentiate themselves in this world. “Traditional automation was rigid. The client would give their forecast for the next ten years and a solution would be created, which would mean that in the early days the solution would probably be underoptimised because it is meant to handle volumes that will be reached in ten years,” explains Remy Malchirand, VP of Sales at Exotec.
“However, it is hard to know where you will be in the future. If you speak to someone who works in retail the first thing they know for sure is that whatever forecast they do, they are going to be wrong. So the idea of building something for ten years is no longer valid. They need to have a solution for right now and they most likely need to have it quickly.
“Speed of implementation and the ability to build a solution that will be able to grow with your customer is critical. At Exotec, we do not ask you to invest for a potential performance volume that you are going to reach in ten years, we ask you to invest for the volume that you need to handle tomorrow. This way, you can have a solution that will be able to follow your growth with flexibility.”
Remy outlines other ways that Exotec innovates the market, stating that “with traditional automation if you wanted to add an extra rack you would need to stop the entire system, but with Exotec you can do that without impacting the production. Even better than that, during high peak periods such as Black Friday we can create a solution that is sized to handle your peak volume. You can rent robots for a month or two just to cover your peak seasons, and that is a massive game changer.”
20 NOVEMBER 2022 | FACTORY&HANDLINGSOLUTIONS
Founded in France in 2015, Exotec has been expanding internationally. “The key market that we serve is midsize to very large companies. A lot of them are international. When we work with Decathlon, we work with them in North America, the U.K., Spain, Italy, Germany, Benelux, and France. So we need to have a kind of global reach to support them wherever they go. “In France, we manufacture our own robots and sell and implement our solution directly. But especially when we go internationally, we usually go with partners. We started working in the UK a couple of years ago with our LAC. If the company wants to work with us directly, you can do that as well, but for us it is a speed advantage to work with a partner.”
Exotec
www.exotec.com 39
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