Towards a smart factory? Learn about laser cutting flexible production material warehouse

According to a report by Supply Chain Dive, a mobile phone contract manufacturer in Dongguan, China replaced 90% of its manpower with robots. Currently, only 60 people can complete the work done by 650 people. The ultimate goal is to reduce it to 20 people.

GE's advanced manufacturing center in South Carolina, the engineering team is trying to simplify the manufacturing process of smart factories with artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).

BASF, a major chemical company, is also introducing a smart factory system to produce customized cleaning products. Once an order is received, the production line will automatically adjust to produce and package according to customer requirements...< /p>

The smart factory is not an idea for a long time. As a part of the industry 4.0, it has become a global trend. A major feature of the smart factory is flexible automation, which combines the company's product and production characteristics to continuously improve the automation of production, inspection and factory logistics.

The sheet metal processing industry that people think of as 'slash and burn' can also achieve flexible production. The answer is the laser cutting flexible production line.

At this stage, the raw materials of products processed by laser are still mainly plates and tubes, especially plate processing, which has basically accounted for more than 80% of the entire laser processing industry. Therefore, for large quantities of various specifications Centralized storage and management of plates can be said to have always been a concern of those related large-scale manufacturing enterprises.

The use of an intelligent sheet material warehouse, together with a laser cutting machine and an automatic sheet material loading and unloading device, can form a complete automatic laser cutting production line.

This production line can realize automatic storage and transfer of plates, automatic warehousing, manipulators automatically grab the plates and place them in the laser cutting station for cutting, automatically unload after cutting, and automatically store finished materials in storage , Automatic waste collection and other functions, the whole process can be unmanned or simply participated by people with simple cooperation, simple operation, easy management, great manpower saving, and the greatest realization of automation and intelligence.

At present, many domestic laser manufacturers have launched laser cutting flexible production lines, mainly including three-dimensional storage (stock storage), automatic loading and unloading systems (including racks, suction devices, fork devices, and finished product sorting tables) ) And plane cutting system.

The laser cutting flexible production line represents a fast, accurate and efficient manufacturing system. The system is composed of a unified information control system, a material storage and transportation system and a set of digital control processing equipment, which can adapt to the automation of processing object transformation Mechanical manufacturing system.