May 2024 Volume 6

AUTOMATION

Robotic 3D Scanning in the Forging Industry Benefits of Intelligent Manufacturing and Challenges to Implementation By Matta Rizkallah

Automation has been deeply integrated into forging plants for many years, with forge presses, trim presses, and the robotics and mate rial handling necessary to run those production lines. That’s certainly the best starting place to invest resources and realize Industry 4.0 gains for a forging house, but one underrated tool for achieving a well-connected smart factory is utilizing metrology and high precision inspec tion on the production floor. For many manufacturers, the next frontier of automation is to automate quality control processes such as metrology and inspection of parts, molds, dies, and other tooling and thereby benefit from the gains of robotics and

MAS in Painted Post, NY), has enabled us to leverage their rich history in the forging industry. For 25+ years, Adaptec has been developing forging automation equipment and pushing the envelope when it comes to implementing robots successfully in forge plants. Forging, however, is fairly new to us. In our early conversations with forging houses, we were surprised to learn about some of the ways that robotic metrology and inspection systems could have a particu larly large impact in the forging industry. Let me explain. In every forge shop, once the forge is set up for a part run, typically, the first few parts that are forged need to be measured to ensure that the forge was set up correctly (top and bottom die alignment). When the very first part comes out (First Article), it needs to head to the CMM lab to be measured. But first it needs to cool down. The cool down process time can take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour for medium to large parts. During the cool down time, the forging house has the option to continue to run the forging line and make parts or they can choose to let the forging line remain paused until the results come back from the lab (typical process for large, high-value forgings). This is a pain point for many forging houses. In the first scenario, many parts would be produced by the line that would be at risk of non-conformance and therefore potentially scrapped. In the second scenario, many parts could have been produced by the line that would have potentially been good parts. There’s no way of telling until the measurements come back from the CMM lab.

automation. These areas have historically been difficult to automate for forging, but technological advancements have now brought these opportunities within reach. Bringing robotic automation into your quality control processes has many of the common benefits of automation — reduced labor cost, reduced scrap, increased speed, increased reliability, repeatability, and traceability — and it additionally provides a greater number of parts being measured giving the quality and production departments high fidelity QC data to make informed decisions faster. In addition to the automated measurements, robotic 3D scanning systems can perform defect detection (Rules-Based as well as AI Deep Learning), to be able to detect high frequency defects like Manufacturing Automation Systems (MAS) has been in the robotic metrology and inspection automation business since 2003 (21 years) and has designed and implemented dozens of automated systems and gauges to measure and inspect products for our customers. MAS has a rich history in the world of automated measurements and inspec tion, and this background has provided us with the experience and tools needed to push the envelope regarding automated metrology for the forging industry. In addition, being aligned with a key FANUC Systems Integrator, namely Adaptec Solutions (down the road from non-fill—something that CMM’s cannot do. Benefits for the Forging Industry

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