QM Medical Curtain Assembly System

Medical Curtain Web Processing Assembly System

QM Systems have designed and manufactured an assembly machine for our nationally recognised medical manufacturing clients.

This flexible solution involves multi stage web processing to Unwind, Pleat, Hook, Clip, and Package a variety of medical curtains at a rate of 11m per minute.

Within this production line we have integrated multiple material handling systems, alongside Yaskawa and Schneider robots, vision systems and ultrasonic welding.

Process of the automated system

  • Material is de-reeled, fed through tensioners to a pleating machine
  • The pleating machine uses hot knives to add pleats into the material
  • Post pleating, driven rollers drive the material to a vertically guided dancing arm to maintain tension
  • Steering mechanism aligns the curtain prior to hooking
  • Hooks are fed onto an infeed conveyor belt via vibratory bowl feeders.
  • Vision system detects hook location, orientation and translates those coordinates to delta robots
  • Delta robots track the infeed conveyor and the system software delegates pick positions to each robot
  • Robots pick hooks and place them into tooling mounted on rotary tables.
  • Rotary table indexes underneath the curtain and hooks are welded using an ultrasonic welding station.
  • Each rotary table tracks a registration mark on each pleat and adjusts to ensure central hook position
  • Post hook welding, a dancing arm buffers the curtain prior to cutting
  • A label is printed and applied to the front and rear of the curtain
  • The curtain is clamped and cut to length and collated into stacks
  • A 6 axis robot picks a clip and inserts it into the stack, clipping it together
  • Completed curtains are fed out onto an indexing conveyor for packaging

Integrated systems

  • Yaskawa GP8 Robot
  • 2x Schneider 3-4 Axis Delta Robots
  • Cognex Vision System
  • Schneider PLC and HMIs
  • 2 x Hook Bowl Feeders
  • Clip Bowl Feeder
  • Post Pleating Dancing Arm
  • 4 x Variant DH0002 Rotary Table
  • 4 x 600w ultrasonic weld heads
  • SAP/ERP/SCADA PC integration
  • Machine frame construction
  • Fully guarded and safety interlocked

In Partnership With

YASKAWA logo
COGNEX logo
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