A New Technology Saves Tier 1 Supplier 50% of Their Program Costs

Significant cost reductions

How did this alternate solution generate such an impressive cost reduction?

• A big slice of the savings came from direct labor. Far fewer operators were required for the two cells compared to the originally planned nine.
• The two cells required fewer maintenance and programming people, as well as fewer people to load/unload and transport product around the facility.
• Maintaining equipment and controlling tolerances on just two cells requires less attention from the Maintenance and Quality staff.
• Proprietary software and hardware tools that allow the plants to keep their laser cells running at high OEE. These tools include laser processing intuitive programming software, automated robot / laser head calibration, and daily feature adjustment by the HMI. These tools are designed to minimize the downtime associated with operating the machine, in return the system runs at very high efficiencies.

Beyond these direct-cost reductions, there are other benefits.

• Changeovers on the two robotic lasers between the 18-part numbers/assemblies are a mere two minutes.
• The two cells require about 30% of the floor space compared to the initial approach, reducing both initial capital costs and ongoing operational expenses.
• Quality is more consistent because there are fewer part holding fixtures. In return, less part paths, less maintenance, and lower tolerance variations.
• The robotic laser cutting cells included vision inspection that instantly identify OK or Not-OK parts, enabling rapid process correction.
• When production problems surface, the simple process stream supports expedited traceability, enabling rapid isolation and correction of problem.
• The incoming racks were not automation friendly, like most extrusion companies, so SPA developed a robotic pick solution to handle 18 variations of band and bundled part stacks.
• The amount of dunnage/ inventory space and WIP (work in process) needed was much smaller.
• The number of quality department tasks and cost associated with customer quality demands is reduced due to the number of reduced geometries and weekly CMM reports.

The aluminum extrusion supplier achieved all these savings and benefits – and earned the distinction of having one of the highest-throughput aluminum cutting cells in the industry – by relying on traditional robotic laser-cutting technology combined with a proprietary enhancement provided by SPA that vastly improves both speed and accuracy.

New demands, new solutions

Auto manufacturers, particularly those producing electric vehicles (EVs), have an intense interest in lightweighting their vehicles. That’s driven exploration of both new materials, mainly aluminum and plastics, as well as opportunities to reduce part count. In one striking example from an EV manufacturer’s high pressure die cast aluminum giga castings, the total part count for the engine cradle and rear carriage of a vehicle was reduced from nearly 200 parts to just two.

Ultra-high strength steel hot stamped door rings have been reducing part counts for the last decade and now seeing automotive lift gates transition from 12-18 parts down to 2 parts using composites and /or high pressure die cast aluminum molding technologies. All of these thermal processes require 3-dimensional flexible cutting and daily adjustment as the parts are forever changing sub millimeter tolerances as the day and week evolves.

Working with new materials and incorporating more features in a smaller number of parts necessitated new and sometimes non-traditional production processes. SPA has been at the forefront of developing these processes, many of which rely on laser cutting.

Early CNC lasers provided high accuracy, repeatability and quality, but with relatively low throughput due to single processing head capability. In the past, integrating robotics with the laser tools improved cycle times, but not to the extent required. The previous robots lacked the accuracy needed, being unable to successfully cut features with customer specified 0.1-0.05 mm tolerances.

SPA’s solution is a 3-axis laser positioner called NEWTON® added to a 6-axis robotic arm. The robot provides the “repeatable” location of the laser on the part. Once in the desired location, the NEWTON® positioning device provides the fine motion (path accuracy of ±0.05 mm) of the laser as it cuts the shape required. NEWTON® works at far higher speeds and accuracy than previously possible via direct robot articulation of the laser.

This application involves aluminum extrusion, however NEWTON® is material-agnostic, able to perform equally well on other metals including press-hardened steels, hydroformed materials, High Pressure Die Cast Aluminum, even nonmetal materials as plastic and composite parts can benefit from this technology.

Cycle-time reduction compared to a typical 6-axis articulated cutting robot is nearly 70 percent when executing high tolerance features. The typical solution is to place 4-8 of these NEWTON® robotic cutting heads around a part or In-Line, this allows the customer to increase their plant profit by calculating part throughput per floorspace.

Consider a new cost model

New technology, new opportunities