Below is an excerpt from ECM USA’s article “The Heat Treat Robotic Paradigm Shift” in Heat Treat Today‘s January 2025 issue.
The full article can be read here: https://www.heattreattoday.com/the-heat-treat-robotic-paradigm-shift/

To learn more about robotics/automation with ECM Robotics, visit: https://www.ecm-robotics.com/

The Heat Treat Robotic Paradigm Shift

by Dennis Beauchesne, ECM USA General Manager

Heat Treatment & Robotics

A heat treatment plant can implement recommendations for the future of industry automation by acquiring technology for:

  • • Automatic loading/unloading
  • • Component recognition systems
  • • Automatically loaded/read recipe systems
  • • Smaller batch sizes with a wide variety of variants
  • • Heat treatment of different applications or steels in small quantities
  • • Maintenance/repair detection

Benefits of automating part or all production line steps include:

  • • Shorter process times
  • • High CHD (Case Hardening Depth) uniformity and lower distortion
  • • Lower operating costs and labor reduction

These technologies have existed and are being implemented in heat treat operations for a few years now. The results are clear and the benefits are proven through higher quality parts, highly efficient heat treat operations, and overall more efficient production facilities. As many machining operations have been robotized, this allows the downstream heat treat operations to easily take advantage of part placement in dunnage and plant transport systems, whether manual or automated.

BATCH LOADING WITH ROBOTICS

Bulk goods-loading (such as clips, links, and other small parts via weight detection) as well as loading and unloading of truck shafts in fixtures and in straightening machines are just a few examples of production areas that can benefit from robotics/automation. Visual recognition systems can identify gears/parts based on the diameter or by the number of teeth on the gear and can then sort them by these features.

Like the visual locating of the parts by cameras, they can also be used for tracking parts and loads within a heat treatment cell. A good amount of work has been done in this area for heat treating. This work covers part marking, tray/fixture encoding, and part weighing scenarios, and allows the heat treat system to accurately process all the different parts coming through the heat treat system with the correct process recipe. Need assistance with your process recipe or looking to do testing to improve metallurgical properties on existing parts? Check out our Synergy Center metallurgical testing lab or contact us today.

Some of the work being done has been implemented with a QR code marking system for each part before heat treatment. To ensure the correct recipe or heat treatment is performed on the proper part, this scanned code works with the heat treatment system controls to upload the correct recipe to the proper cell. This information can be further analyzed to indicate precise placement in the heat treat tray through virtual tracking.

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