Sheet metal flexible production line with MES integrated control

Sheet metal flexible production line with MES integrated control

With the advent of “Made in China 2025”, the degree of automation in industrial manufacturing will become higher and higher, and the application of MES system in sheet metal processing will also become more and more extensive. MES has been widely used in foreign countries, and many domestic companies are also interested in MES.

Overview of Sheet Metal Flexible Production Line

It is mainly composed of multi-column warehouse unit, punching and shearing compound unit, laser cutting unit, robot bending unit, etc.

Multi-Line Warehouse Unit

Multi-row storage unit mainly consists of shelves, aisle-type stacker cranes, inlet and outlet tables, WCS system, WMS system, etc. It is used for storage of plates, information management, and transporting plates to each equipment end for processing.

Punching and shearing compound unit

Punching and shearing compound unit mainly consists of loading device, punching machine, right-angle shearing device, sorting device, palletizing device, etc.; the plates are taken out from the multi-column warehouse for stamping, forming, rolling rib, marking and other process processing, and sheared into each semi-finished part, and the different parts are sorted and stacked by the palletizing device and then stored on the shelves.

Laser cutting unit

The laser cutting unit mainly consists of loading and unloading device, laser cutting machine, interactive table, etc.; the plates are taken out from the multi-row warehouse for cutting and processing, sorted by the loading and unloading device, and then stored on the shelves.

Robotic bending unit

Robotic bending unit mainly consists of loading table, positioning table, turning frame, robot, bending machine, and unloading table. It is used to bend some parts processed by punching and shearing compound unit/laser cutting unit into various semi-finished products required by customers and transfer them to the next process by hand.

Equipment task self-identification

After receiving the task sent from the upper unit, the equipment performs task identification, which is as follows.

(1) Punching and shearing compound unit: check whether the machine tool characteristics such as machine stroke and punching tonnage meet the requirements of the task; check whether the punching machine tooling and shearing machine knife clearance are ready in place.

(2) Laser cutting unit: check whether the cutting gas meets the requirements.

(3) Robot bending unit: mainly whether the bending tooling is feasible.

After the equipment task identification is completed, the identification result is fed back to the upper control system, and the processing starts immediately for the tasks that can be executed, and the reasons for the task failure are fed back to the upper control system for the tasks that failed to be identified.

The punching and shearing compound unit, stamping unit, laser cutting unit and robotic bending unit ask for materials from the material store according to the received task requirements. Since the punching and shearing compound unit, stamping unit, laser cutting unit and robotic bending unit are all provided with raw materials by the multi-lane store unit, the multi-lane store unit delivers raw materials to the equipment in order according to the time sequence of their requests for materials. If raw materials are found to be unavailable or in tight quantity, feedback is given to MES in time to prompt timely replenishment.

Equipment processing and information feedback

The processing equipment starts the task of processing after the raw material sheets are delivered to the warehouse. During the processing, the equipment provides real-time feedback to the upper position for the processing information, and the equipment status is refreshed in real time.

MES system control process

The main control process of MES system is to establish the operation plan, check the material, schedule the processing if there is no shortage of material, send the operation plan to each equipment end, after the equipment end sends the material request, the multi-lane warehouse unit will distribute the material, after the distribution is completed, the equipment end starts the production, after the production is completed, the semi-finished products are put into the warehouse application, the material is put into the warehouse, and the work is reported.