Innovative electric motor manufacturing machine exploits advanced PClbus motion control technology

Citation

(2003), "Innovative electric motor manufacturing machine exploits advanced PClbus motion control technology", Assembly Automation, Vol. 23 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.2003.03323aaf.002

Innovative electric motor manufacturing machine exploits advanced PClbus motion control technology

Innovative electric motor manufacturing machine exploits advanced PClbus motion control technology

Keywords: Motor assembly

Semi-autonomous cells link to automate entire process, producing motor assemblies every 20 s.

Motion controllers compatible with Mint software are at the heart of what is believed to be the most advanced piece of automation ever produced for electric motor manufacturing.

Developed by Alliance Winding for Baldor, the new machine automates virtually the entire motor manufacturing process from coil winding and welding stator laminations, to assembly, test and fitting of outer product packaging - and is capable of producing finished assemblies every 20 s to most programmable specifications (Plate 2).

Plate 2 Developed by Alliance Winding for Baldor, the new machine automates virtually the entire motor manufacturing process and is capable of producing finished assemblies every 20 s to most programmable specifications

Representing an investment of $4 million, the machine provides Baldor with extreme manufacturing flexibility, allowing it to produce custom motors in very small batches. The only human intervention required is to replenish materials, and to attach the connection leads.

Apart from this, production is entirely automated, with motors progressing from manufacturing cell to cell along a conveyor for the various stages of build. It is the most highly automated process of this type that Alliance Winding - recognised leaders in this field - has ever produced.

In all, 78 axes of motion and over 200 motors are employed to automate the processes. Mint motion controllers were chosen for the underlying real-time control capability required to implement this application. These controllers allowed Alliance Winding to divide the complex motion control system down into loosely-coupled, semi-autonomous sub-systems which control the functions performed at each stages, initiating actions in response to I/O events, under the supervisory control of a host PC running a Visual Basic user interface.

This distributed architecture was made possible by the ability of the NextMove PCI bus cards to store and execute embedded motion control programs locally, using the interpreter-style capability of the Mint embedded system. The card's onboard analog and digital I/O was also critical in providing an efficient solution, as in addition to controlling the servo motor axes that manage the core manufacturing cell functions such as coil winding, the control loops all rely on fast I/O processing to sense and react to events.

"The high level keywords and the macro facilities of the Mint language helped to speed implementation of the motion control system on this ambitious project", notes Barb Smith, Systems Integrator with Alliance Winding. "We devised a number of macros which condense sophisticated operations into friendly single commands - helping to reduce the complexity of the control problem, by simplifying coding, debug and optimization."

In total, eight types of cells are used in this application: "shed" winders for creating the wire coils on forms (there are six on the machine), plus stations for welding stator laminations, inserting the coils into the laminations, lead placement (manually performed), lead crimping, continuity testing, wire bonding, and fitting outer product shell.

"We've never seen automation to this level before in the motor industry", adds Pete Morreale of Alliance Winding. "The architectural principles we've established in the design of this machine provide a platform to link items of automation which are traditionally used standalone - eliminating virtually all of the manual operations required for producing electric motors and allowing custom products to be built without missing a beat".