Prima Power showcased a unique production solution at this year’s Blechexpo; a perfect solution for a wide range of materials and complex product manufacturing.
The manufacturing line includes a combined punching and laser cutting machine Combi Genius, a loading, unloading and stacking robot LSR, a servo-electric press brake eP Genius 1030 with an integrated tool change storage, and a 7-axis industrial robot.
With its profitable combination of productivity and flexibility, this system is a perfect solution for a wide range of materials and complex product manufacturing. Designed to be an efficient process solver and challenge-ready manufacturing line, it handles the tighter bends, the thicker materials and the most complex assemblies. These features make it the perfect tool for several industries, such as machinery and yellow goods.
The system displayed at Blechexpo relies on the next-level Combi Genius for combined punching and laser cutting. This advanced model features a bigger combined working area, better cutting performance with 6kW laser power with new cutting head and efficient gas mixer, and improved robot performance. The resulting main benefits are a strong reduction of cycle times thanks to a 25% cutting speed increase, a 25% saving in gas consumption, a huge overall improvement in cutting quality of highly sensitive materials such as aluminium.
The enhanced performance of the Combi Genius adds to the unparalleled flexibility of this automatic multi-purpose solution, which integrates different working stages thus speeding up production and reducing manufacturing costs.
For the efficient and accurate handling of the material flow from the punch-laser combined system and the bending cell, the line exhibited in Stuttgart includes the loading, unloading and stacking robot LSR. The robot loads sheets to the machine and stacks finished work pieces onto stacking pallets.
After the parts are punched and cut with the Combi Genius and handled by LSR, they can be bent by the state-of-the-art eP Genius 1030 press brake with an integrated 7-axis industrial robot.
The eP1030 is the best-selling machine of the servo-electric press brake family, and it comes complete with an automatic tool change storage that can hold 28 meters of upper and lower bending tools (dies and punches) on 7 racks. This press brake offers a more versatile, faster and more reliable bending solution, eliminating the need for manual machine set-up.
The real innovation of the eP Genius presented at Blechexpo is the addition of the anthropomorphic robot for loading and unloading operations. This makes it possible to work completely unmanned, freeing up the operator’s time for value-added activities such as preparing and testing production programs.
In a direct mode, the robot picks up the punched/cut parts released by the LSR of the Combi Genius on a roller table, places them on the press brake to be bent and unloads them on pallets positioned on the floor. The robot can also work in a temporary buffer mode, i.e. in a continuous process with a temporary waiting condition.
The robotic cell is configured with a Sheet Reverser, which allows the robot to turn over the part to be bent or the component before stacking it, whenever this is required by the operating program, and with a Gripper Storage, which can accommodate 3 different grippers, which are automatically stored by the robot when they are not in use.
Contact: Barry Rooney