February 2020

48 n ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATED MANUFACTURING February 2020 www.drivesncontrols.com Robot delivers concrete benefits for slab-moulding machine M orris Brothers, an engineering firm that specialises in producing concrete-moulding machines, is located in Burslem, near Stoke-on-Trent. The business was formed in 1948 by brothers Fred and Harry Morris and remains a family-run firm. The company began life as a repair centre, maintaining and servicing trucks and buses. Not long after it had been established, the company returned a repaired truck to a business that specialised in products made from china clay. While there, it was asked if it could help produce an urgently-needed bottom-retaining strip for a clay-moulding machine. Following the successful completion of this task, Morris Brothers moved into the manufacture of parts for clay-moulding machines and has since evolved into a manufacturer of bespoke concrete presses for customers around the world. When the company received an enquiry from Turkey for a three-station press capable of manufacturing large concrete slabs, Morris Brothers’ works manager, Mick Humphries, a 43-year veteran of the business, assembled a team and got to work on a detailed design. A key part of the moulding process in this application – and one which had the greatest potential to hinder production – was the demoulding process, where completed slabs of formed concrete are removed from the press and placed onto an adjacent pallet. With each slab typically weighing 9.5–12.5kg, and with up to 4,500 slabs needing to be demoulded and placed onto pallets in each nine-hour shift, it became clear that a robot would be needed. The demoulding operation required each slab to be picked up horizontally using vacuum grippers. The slabs are then lifted and rotated through 90 degrees into a vertical position as the robot armmoves across to an adjacent stacking pallet, where they are placed vertically into storage and transportation racks. Although Morris Brothers has worked with several robot manufacturers, its preferred supplier is Kawasaki. For the Turkish project, a heavy-duty ZX-165U robot was chosen. This six-axis machine offered the speed and precision required, with a reach of more than 2.6m and a repeatable accuracy (at maximum reach) of ±0.3mm. The robot has a rotating wrist which, even when fully laden, can rotate through 260 degrees per second. The robot also offered the potential for expansion. Because it would be working well within its design specification, the customer could would be able to use the robot to handle heavier loads, or for different tasks, and at higher speeds, with minimal reprogramming. “When we first spoke with Morris Brothers about this project, their team had already honed down the detail design of the press and identified exactly what they wanted a robot to do as part of this three-station machine,”recalls Kawasaki Robotics’Ian Hensman.“Being able to agree the precise operating parameters so early in the project meant that we were able to provide themwith a computer-generated simulation very quickly from our CAE facility. As a result, all parties were able to confirm in record time that the proposed ZX-165U robot would indeed be ideal for the requirements set out in the specification.” The concrete-moulding machine was delivered well within the agreed delivery time and is now producing thousands of concrete slabs a week at the plant in Turkey. From the initial enquiry to the fully commissioned installation 2,000 miles away, took just 26 weeks. n A Stoke-on-Trent based engineering company has built a custom-built slab-moulding machine for a customer in Turkey. The machine uses a robot to demould up to 4,500 concrete slabs during a nine-hour shift and place them onto pallets. The six-axis robot slab-moulding machine can demould 500 concrete slabs every hour and stack them onto pallets