If one thing rings true across most aspects of manufacturing, it’s that die crashes, downtime and repairs can get expensive, and quickly. But after working with a team of technical and product experts at Barnum, one Michigan-based plant has implemented a proactive and straightforward solution to curb one of the industry’s biggest profit inhibitors.
With large machinery and extremely heavy dies operating at any given time, the potential for misaligned pins to break on impact presented an extremely expensive downtime risk at the plant, resulting at one point in half a million dollars in lost productivity and repairs. Our customer needed a solution that would not only help prevent this from happening, but also communicate to machine operators which pins within the die may be at risk for instigating a crash.
The result was a highly flexible, yet simple solution that could be packaged and applied to any machine, and as many dies as needed with the convenience of a one-time sensor configuration. By developing an HMI Master Box that could be programmed to communicate with all sensors installed on a die, our engineering team was able to create an easy and cost-effective way to both retroactively equip and design new dies with the technology. The decentralized nature of IO Link blocks were critical to the success of the design, as they are able to relay information from multiple dies using any one machine setup.
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The package is designed to be a ready-to-go, turnkey solution paired with base programming by our Barnum Technical Support Team.
