Reducing the weight of conveyor guide rail
Reducing the weight of the heavy guide rail accessory by nearly 7kg
boosted conveyor speed and production capacity.
Overview
Industry
Semiconductor and electronic components industry
Applications and advantages
Guide rail accessory for conveyor system
Replacing the aluminum guide rail accessory with one made of Futaba's CFRP PLATE dramatically reduced weight without requiring design changes.
Background of introduction
Problems to solve
Parts attached to the guide rail are heavy, and increasing conveyor speed to raise production efficiency led to motor step-out.
Circumstances
To increase production efficiency, it was desired to increase the speed of the conveyor system.
The heavy guide rail parts impaired usability.
The guide rail components were heavy, causing motor step-out when the speed was increased.
Owing to the heavy guide rail components, step-out would occur in the motor when the speed was increased, resulting in slow conveyor operation.
Futaba's CFRP PLATE solves the problem!
The conveyor guide rail parts were fabricated using Futaba's CFRP PLATE, halving the weight! The conveyor speed doubled.
Advantages of introduction
Advantages of introducing FUTABA's CFRP Plate
Halving the weight of the guide rail parts using Futaba's CFRP PLATE doubled conveyor speed.
Weight of guide rail parts reduced
Conveyor speed doubled
Guide rail accessory
Material: A5052
Weight: 13.50 kg
Weight reduced from 13.50 kg to 6.95 kg
Halving the weight increased the conveyor speed from 750 mm/sec to 1,500 mm/sec.
Guide rail accessory
Material: Futaba's CFRP PLATE
Weight: 6.95 kg
Comments from a Professional Engineer
This example demonstrates improved cycle times and increased throughput with existing equipment. They replaced metal components with ones made of Futaba's CFRP PLATE to reduce weight and increase operational speed. In cases like this, it is tremendously helpful to use the existing design for metal components without modification. The only change was to substitute aluminum or steel with Futaba's CFRP PLATE. Compared to redesigning the mechanism of the component in question, this significantly cuts the man-hours and lead time required for design, investigation, and testing. With respect to other costs, adding the costs involved in these activities to the material and processing costs required for the component results in Futaba's CFRP PLATE providing an extremely simple and convenient solution.
Professional Engineer, Japan; certified by the Institution of Professional Engineers, Japan Nagano Professional Engineer Office CEO
Makoto Nagano