May 2024 Volume 6

EQUIPMENT & TECHNOLOGY

Hard To Handle? Not With the Right Equipment for Handling Heavy Forgings By Boris Marcukaitis

The productivity of closed-die forging lines and ring rolling plants strongly depends on the right handling equipment. This equipment ensures fast and efficient loading and unloading of the forming machines. The different surrounding circumstances require custom ized solutions that match the situation perfectly. Often the challenge is to fulfill contrary requirements such as long tongs for large presses and great maneuverability of a compact mobile machine. DANGO & DIENENTHAL offers a great range of handling manipulators to serve various handling tasks. Due to new handling challenges, the range of special machines is continually extended. Selecting a manipulator for the handling of heavy forgings should be done wisely. Answer yourself a few questions, which will help you to choose the best solution to increase the productivity of your plant: • Which area has to be covered by the handling device? • Which equipment and positions have to be reached by the handling machine? • Are there other vehicles or cranes moving in this specific area? • Which accuracy has to be achieved? • Which are the batch sizes of the production / How many unique parts have to be handled? • Which cycle times should be achieved and what is the bottle neck that dictates the rhythm? • What is the weight / size / shape of the work pieces? Mobile Transport Manipulators A mobile transport manipulator is a good choice, if the area is big and the handling machine has to serve a lot of equipment like furnaces and presses. This machine is able to maneuver within the whole production area freely and is fast enough to cover long distances in short times. Most of these manipulators are driven by a diesel engine, which also allows traveling between several halls. If the working area of the manipulator is only foreseen in one hall and one production line, an energy supply by drag cable to feed an electrical hydraulic pump is an elegant way to forget about refueling the manipulator. A forklift with attached tongs may be a cheap short-time solution, but will it improve your production sustainably? A big disadvan tage is that the view to the work piece is constantly blocked by the lifting mast in front of the operator. This makes it nearly impossible to handle the workpieces fast and precisely. In addition, a forklift is not originally built to work in a forging facility, and it will not last very long.

Mobile transport manipulators from DANGO & DIENENTHAL deliver a great performance and durability in a forge because they are designed for that purpose. The ± 90° steering ability of the driven rear wheels allow them to turn around on the spot. The rigid lever system gives the tongs all the degrees of freedom that are needed for the handling of forgings in closed-die forges and ring rolling plants: Parallel lifting, vertical tilting, and side-shifting. On the standard machines, the operator’s cabin is placed on the left side, which gives the operator a good view to the tip of the tongs, no matter in which position. But sometimes special circumstances require special solu tions (Figure 1). Therefore, centered cabins with or without lifting function are sometimes used.

Figure 1: Mobile Transport Manipulator Most of the time, the facility will not be built around the manipu lator, but the manipulator has to fit into given surroundings. Espe cially in ring rolling plants the working area is quite narrow most of the time. On the other hand, deep furnaces are used to provide suffi cient heating capacity for the billets. In this case, we can provide lever systems with the additional ability to extend the tongs for loading and unloading of furnaces and ring rolling machines and to retract the tongs for maneuvering in narrow areas (Figure 2).

FIA MAGAZINE | MAY 2024 20