August 11th of this year “The Monty Heat Treat News” had a news item about a UK based heat treater who recently added “Robotics in a Vacuum Brazing Application”-the press release prompted the team at the “The Monty” to contemplate robotics in the commercial heat treatment industry. The bottom line is of course that there is very little in the way of robotics and automation in the industry largely for two reasons; First is that many commercial shops are largely “job” shops meaning small volumes. Second, few manufacturers offer their heat treaters long-term contracts which makes it difficult to justify large investments in automation.

There are exceptions to these rules though and August 12th we pointed out another example at commercial heat treater “Thermetco” in Longueil, Quebec, Canada.

Today we have another example, this from in-house heat treater “AGCO/FENDT”, in Marktoberdorf, Germany-a manufacturer of tractors. This example is quite common in that press quenching applications rely heavily on robots-we would assume because this is because this is single part processing of high end parts. What you are looking at in these photos (taken by Gord Montgomery of “The Monty”) is an automated press quenching cell. This is dedicated to a small group of transmission components requiring the tightest specs on distortion and this cell is 100% automated-parts go in one end and robots take over all of the loading/unloading. We can’t tell you off hand who supplied the press quenching system, there are two major suppliers of press quenching systems in Germany, “Wickert” and “HEESS” both of whom do a very good job.

In this case parts are removed from an “Aichelin” rotary hearth furnace and transferred to the press quench system via a robot-look closely and you can see a “heat shield” attached to the robotic arm just behind the “gripper”. Similar robotic systems can also be found in heat treat applications for clutch plates, bearing races and a wide variety of gears.

Next week we will look at a “lights out” batch IQ system we recently viewed in Italy.

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