Testing railway service and parking brake cylinders, this ATE was designed for the purpose of housing all mechanical, electrical and electronic parts together with all control systems and software for testing into one machine. Achieving a footprint no bigger than 800mm x 2000mm, it is manually loaded by an operator using a crane, with the test procedure being automated.
For testing the cylinders, we use a servo controlled lead screw with load cell feedback. For the parking brake Bowden cable, we use pneumatic cylinder actuation with load cell feedback.
In order to make the system fully automatic, the requirement of
operating the resetting nut in both clockwise and anticlockwise directions has also been automated. An Atlas Copco Torque Driver was used for the turning the resetting nut as well as measuring torque feedback. This device and the SMC pneumatic circuit are software controlled, meaning no manual input is required.
The system utilised an industrial PC fitted with NI (National Instruments) software to execute test routines, as well as a barcode reader compatible with both 2D and 3D elements to scan the product information.
