SuperTrak CONVEYANCE™ – Smart Conveyance Advantages

SuperTrak CONVEYANCE™ provides a magnetic conveyance platform that does much more than just move parts along an assembly line conveyor system. Smart Conveyance technology adds value to automated assembly by incorporating a number of features into one platform, enabling higher performance with less engineering and risk.

Smart Conveyance adds an asynchronous motion capability that simplifies automated assembly system design and accesses integrated functionality through an intelligent user interface to achieve higher performance with less risk.

Fundamental advantages

Conventional conveyor and sortation systems are passive, waiting for components to be fed in to move along fixed tracks. But Smart Conveyance makes motion active, adding it as a controllable and variable element in the overall process. The motion control capability of the Smart Conveyance system can thus act as the assembly foundation, greatly simplifying what needs to be built on top of it.

The SuperTrak CONVEYANCE™ platform offers three major advantages over a traditional conveyor system:

• Speed: Smart Conveyance moves components in and out of stations as quickly as possible, adding value through less time lost while in motion, lowered settling times, and rapid acceleration to improve cycle times and overall productivity.

• Precision: Picking and placing, pressing, dispensing, fastening, inspection, testing, loading, and unloading are all assembly processes that must be conducted precisely. Smart Conveyance’s increased precision eliminates add-ons such as stopper cylinders or tooling locators. It minimizes cycle times with fewer parts, less adaptive engineering, and ultimately more productive and space-efficient automated assembly.

• Independent Shuttle Control: Smart Conveyance means the ability to independently control each shuttle’s velocity and acceleration, position, and destination. This provides engineers with easier control of asynchronous motion, enabling overall higher-performing automation in a smaller footprint.

Added values

The fundamental advantages of Smart Conveyance unlock a series of further key benefits that can directly impact efficiencies in the final system and add value to the business:

• OEE: Operational Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a top-of-mind metric tied to output, availability, and quality, and is often top of mind for the user. Smart Conveyance impacts OEE on all three axes: by maximising availability by eliminating need for conveyor maintenance, increasing quality assurance through smarter parts tracking, status monitoring and recorded history, and maximising performance in moving parts in and out of place without wasted motion and enabling the smart use of multiple variants.

• Simplification: Smart Conveyance can simplify the system by removing unnecessary duplicate stations and satellite systems. It also helps simplify by reducing operation time for part changeovers, downtime recovery, and general scheduled maintenance.

• Operations: Indirect benefits occur from utilizing features found only on SuperTrak CONVEYANCE™ platforms to significantly reduce tooling complexity and the number of stations required, reclaiming factory footprint to add to future operations, expansion of use-vs-market demand, reduction of integration risk, and the option of duplicating the system anywhere worldwide depending on market demand.

Smart assembly

SuperTrak CONVEYANCE™ meets all the criteria that define smart technology:

• Integrated Functionality: Where the speed, precision and independent motion control of shuttles actually form components of the total automation system design, and the magnetic conveyance system also serves as a foundation of automation platform.

• Performance Optimization: Where speed, precision and independent motion also act together to eliminate wasted motion, reduce cycle times, minimise required floorspace footprint and maximize OEE.

• Energy Efficiency: a SuperTrak-based machine is leaner, requires less stations and tooling compared to a system based on a conventional conveyor or belt system. Energy is also saved through reduced overall size, complexity, and footprint of system as well as boosted OEE.

• Diagnostic Insight: Conveyance is the process connector. It can act as a conduit to collect information about the overall system status and the parts being produced.

• Intuitive User Interface: SuperTrak TrakMaster™ software can guide all setup configuration and user functions, making it easy to independently program and control an almost infinite variety of asynchronous motion operations, including integrated operations, function blocks, process simulations and diagnostic tools.

In all these ways Smart Conveyance technology revolutionizes the manufacturing space by greatly reducing factory footprint, enabling lean assembly, speeding downtime recovery, and improving OEE. Additionally, the system configuration options with SuperTrak CONVEYANCE™ allows designers to accommodate unique spacing challenges and can even be built around or integrated into existing automation.

Resources

Click on Smart Conveyance for further information
Click on About SuperTrak CONVEYANCE™ for video
Click on Independent Shuttle Control to view animation