Experimental and theoretical investigations of part orientation in linear vibratory part feeders

Abstract

In the global manufacturing environment, automation plays a major role in the field of material handling and assembly line. The art and science of positioning, moving, packing and storing components in any form is material handling in industries. The material handling devices are specially designed for a particular task and integrated with part feeders to decrease the lead time in industries. Production industries handle large volume of components and hence there is a need to introduce automation techniques. In order to implement automation in assembly line, a part feeding system is essential for handling the parts and the linear vibratory part feeder is designed and developed in this research work. Part feeders in assembly automation are widely used to handle various shaped parts since they transform any orientation of part into desirable orientation. This reduces the cost and time of part handling in industries which increases the productivity and profit. Part feeding system consists of a series of gates or barriers to change the orientation of part from its initial orientation to desirable orientation. Linear vibratory part feeders and vibratory bowl feeders are commonly used in industries. In this present work, an irregular shaped component i.e. rocker arm is selected for study. It is widely used in automobile industries to open and close the valves in internal combustion engines. The handling of rocker arm in assembly process requires automation to reduce the lead time and improve the productivity. To implement the same, a linear vibratory part feeder is developed in this research work to handle the rocker arm.Drop test is performed by considering the drop height from 10 mm to 500 mm with 10 mm incremental height. Eight possible resting orientations are observed during the trial experiment. The rocker arm is dropped from eight possible orientations, the natural resting orientation of rocker arm is observed and most favourable natural resting orientation of rocker arm is determined. Theoretical methods such