Framework for the Integration of Service and Technology Strategies

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityAfter sales service is a highly profitable business for manufacturers of technology-driven products. Due to this fact competitors want to share in high profit margins. At the same time after sales business has to deal with an increasing range of variants of products and technologies, shorter life cycles and changing customer demands. In spite of these manifold challenges, often neither after sales departments are involved in the early product development stage nor are customer demands and technical parameters considered in the service development processes entirely. Therefore an integration of service and technology strategies is necessary. This paper presents a framework for this integration that visualises the complex interdependencies and interfaces between service as well as product and motor vehicle workshop technologies.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

Battery system development - Assembly planning between lightweight design and high volume production

Battery systems of electric vehicles suffer from low energy densities as well as high masses and geometrical complexity. The absence of standards for battery cells and peripheral components in combination with large and distributed design spaces within passenger vehicles open up innumerable possibilities to design battery systems. The results are product specific and uneconomical assembly systems. This paper describes the work of the TU Braunschweig to create a methodology that generates and evaluates modular and easy to assemble battery systems based upon user requirements. This methodology gathers and links requirements between the priorities "lightweight design" and "high volume production" including a partly automated generation of CAD data. The generated concepts are directly used for assembly planning. The presented methodology therefore represents a simultaneous engineering approach that shortens development time and supports design engineers as well as process planners

Self-supporting End Effectors: Towards Low Powered Robots for High Power Tasks

AbstractNew tasks for industrial robots often require high stiffness or entail high reaction forces, which are currently provided by the robot structure itself. This leads to heavy and expensive robot structures: designed for the main task, but oversized for positioning and movement tasks.We propose a new approach to resolve these contradicting requirements: supporting the end effector directly against the workpiece or its surroundings, thus diverting the reaction forces away from the robot structure. We demonstrate this approach in a joining application and present design methods for self-supporting robotic tools as well as potential industrial applications of this technique

Grasp Point Optimization and Leakage-Compliant Dimensioning of Energy-Efficient Vacuum-Based Gripping Systems

Vacuum-based handling, used in many applications and industries, offers great flexibility and fast handling processes. However, due to significant energy conversion losses from electrical energy to the useable suction flow, vacuum-based handling is highly energy-inefficient. In preliminary work, we showed that our grasp optimization method offers the potential to save at least 50% of energy by a targeted placement of individual suction cups on the part to be handled. By considering the leakage between gripper and object, this paper aims to extend the grasp optimization method by predicting the effective compressed air consumption depending on object surface roughness, gripper diameter and gripper count. Through balancing of the target pressure difference and the leakage tolerance in combination with the gripper count and gripper diameter, significant reductions of the compressed air, use and therefore the overall energy consumption, can be achieved. With knowledge about the gripper-specific leakage behavior, in the future it will be straightforward for system integrators to minimize the need for oversizing due to process-related uncertainties and therefore to provide application-specific and energy-optimized handling solutions to their customers

Untersuchungen zum Umformen von Feinblechen aus Magnesiumknetlegierungen

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Studie zum One-Shot Prozess an Holz-Kunststoff-Verbunden

Environmental changes force industries to use renewable and degradable materials for lightweight solutions to solve weight and therefore CO2. One highly prioritized topic is the combination of wood materials with biodegradable plastics. Especially when processing these materials, it is essential to develop efficient processes to reduce obstacles and enable the application in serial use. To take advantage of the mechanical behaviour of the wood structure it is necessary to investigate the combination of thin solid wood with plastic. Regarding large-scale production, an injection moulding process is addressed in this study. When processing raw material cutting operations are used. To use the shear cutting process has several advantages: it is a cost effective process with short cycle times. Also no thermal influence or water immersion occur on the working material (like in laser beam or water jet methods), so material sensitive on this can be worked by shearing. But as a disadvantage a working force is applied. This work aims to show the findings this working fore on 5mm wood solids and the influence of the created surface on the bonding between plastic and wood cutting edge. The process connections and dependencies of shear cutting and injection moulding are investigated. Different wood materials were used to analyse the effects of cutting and material parameters (e.g. moisture, forces) on the cutting edge quality (e.g. structural damage). To detect the effect of different cutting edge qualities on the joint between wood and plastic component tensile specimen were tested.Umweltveränderungen zwingen die Industrie, erneuerbare und abbaubare Materialien für Leichtbaulösungen zu verwenden, um Gewicht und damit CO2 einzusparen. Ein hochpriorisiertes Thema ist die Kombination von Holzwerkstoffen mit biologisch abbaubaren Kunststoffen. Besonders bei der Verarbeitung dieser Materialien ist es wichtig, effiziente Prozesse zu entwickeln, um Hindernisse für den Markteintritt zu reduzieren und die Anwendung im Serieneinsatz zu ermöglichen. Um das mechanische Verhalten der Holzfaserstruktur auszunutzen, ist es notwendig, die Kombination von dünnem Holz mit Kunststoff zu untersuchen. Im Hinblick auf die Großserienproduktion wird in dieser Studie das Spritzgussverfahren adressiert. Die Anwendung des Scherschneidverfahrens hat einige Vorteile: Es ist ein kostengünstiges Verfahren mit kurzen Zykluszeiten. Auch findet keine thermische Beeinflussung oder Eintauchen in Wasser auf das zu bearbeitende Material statt (wie beim Laserstrahl- oder Wasserstrahlverfahren), sodass darauf empfindliches Material durch Schneiden bearbeitet werden kann. Als Nachteil wird jedoch eine Arbeitskraft aufgebracht. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die Erkenntnisse zu zeigen, die die scherende Bearbeitung an 5mm Holzwerkstoffen und der folgende Einfluss der erzeugten Oberfläche auf die Verbindung zwischen Kunststoff und Holz hat. Die Prozesszusammenhänge und -abhängigkeiten von Scherschneiden und Spritzgießen werden untersucht. Es wurden verschiedene Holzwerkstoffe verwendet, um die Auswirkungen von Schnitt- und Materialparametern (z.B. Feuchtigkeit, Kräfte) auf die Schnittkantenqualität (z.B. Strukturschäden) zu analysieren. Um den Einfluss unterschiedlicher Schnittkantenqualitäten auf die Verbindung zwischen Holz- und Kunststoffbauteil zu erkennen, wurden Zugproben untersucht

Increasing the Energy-Efficiency in Vacuum-Based Package Handling Using Deep Q-Learning

Billions of packages are automatically handled in warehouses every year. The gripping systems are, however, most often oversized in order to cover a large range of different carton types, package masses, and robot motions. In addition, a targeted optimization of the process parameters with the aim of reducing the oversizing requires prior knowledge, personnel resources, and experience. This paper investigates whether the energy-efficiency in vacuum-based package handling can be increased without the need for prior knowledge of optimal process parameters. The core method comprises the variation of the input pressure for the vacuum ejector, compliant to the robot trajectory and the resulting inertial forces at the gripper-object-interface. The control mechanism is trained by applying reinforcement learning with a deep Q-agent. In the proposed use case, the energy-efficiency can be increased by up to 70% within a few hours of learning. It is also demonstrated that the generalization capability with regard to multiple different robot trajectories is achievable. In the future, the industrial applicability can be enhanced by deployment of the deep Q-agent in a decentral system, to collect data from different pick and place processes and enable a generalizable and scalable solution for energy-efficient vacuum-based handling in warehouse automation

Computational Manufacturing for Multi-Material Lightweight Parts

In this contribution, a computational approach for the manufacturing of multi-material lightweight parts is presented. For an efficient online optimization procedure, a proper orthogonal decomposition on offline obtained numerical results is carried out to construct a surrogate model. The functionality of the proposed framework is demonstrated on a use case study of a multi-material component consisting of a sheet metal basic structure and a plastic reinforcement structure. The manufacturing process chain consists of a deep drawing process followed by an injection molding process of short fiber reinforced plastics. The proposed methodology provides a fast and accurate computational model for structural properties with respect to the process settings

Design and Analysis of Mechanical Gripper Technologies for Handling Mesh Electrodes in Electrolysis Cell Production

As climate change accelerates, the demand for green energy is growing significantly. Due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy, the need for long-term storage is growing at the same rate. Hydrogen presents itself as a promising option for long-term storage, the need for electrolysis plants is therefore increasing significantly. Solutions for scaling up alkaline electrolysis production are currently lacking, particularly in the handling of large mesh electrodes. Therefore, new gripping concepts and technologies have to be developed to enable precise and automated handling of the electrodes, as established handling methods have failed due to the porous, limp and weakly magnetic material properties. This paper therefore presents two new ingressive gripping technologies in the form of individual gripping elements, which can later be combined to form a gripper. The technologies identified here are based on a threaded structure on the one hand and a spiral-like structure on the other. Depending on the mesh geometry to be handled, the gripper elements are designed accordingly. In order to grip the mesh, the gripping element is moved forward and turned at the same time. For verification, sample gripper elements were tested for a range of mesh geometries. The individual gripper elements were produced using selective Laser melting process (SLM), as the fine structures would be exceedingly challenging as well as very costly to produce using conventional manufacturing methods. The gripper elements were tested for three aspects of the handling process: Reliability, retention force and precision. The results in finer meshes show a high holding force for the spiral structures, while the screw structures show more potential in precision. In terms of performance in finer meshes, both structures have potential for use in mesh electrodes, with the low retention force of the screw structures due to the increasing imprecision of the SLM process

Disassembly of electric vehicle batteries using the example of the Audi Q5 hybrid system

The rising number of electric vehicles comes along with an increasing demand for Li-Ion batteries. As resources such as lithium are valuable it is economically worthwhile to recycle EV batteries. One of the first steps of every battery recycling process is the disassembly, which can be a quite time and cost consuming process and hence has to be planned properly. Using the battery of the hybrid car Audi Q5 as a case study, a planning approach for the disassembly will be discussed in this paper. Therefore, disassembly sequences will be derived from a priority matrix and a disassembly graph will be drawn up. Finally, recommendations for the design of the disassembly system and work stations will be given.Audi AG and Electrocycling GmbHAutomotive Research Center Niedersachsen (NFF)German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safet