Grippers for medical technology
Know-how for medical technology 4.0
The variants of medical technology systems are increasing, batch sizes are becoming smaller, the cycles for new innovations are shortening and track and trace will also be introduced into the production of medical technology components. Gimatic, manufacturer of customized gripper solutions, is equipped for medical technology 4.0.
Medical technology will also grow strongly in the coming years due to the growing world population. In order to meet demand, it must be massively automated. Only a few people in the third world have access to medical care today. In the second world, only about half of the population has access to medical care and medicines. In contrast, medical technology for the first world is constantly being improved. The production of individual medication in particular is constantly increasing here.
End-to-end expertise from tools to approval
The takeover of the Gimatic Group by the American company Barnes Inc. in October 2018 has resulted in networking and collaboration with other Barnes companies within the Group. This includes Otto Männer in Balingen am Kaiserstuhl. The specialist for precision molds and valve gate hot runner systems for high-quality plastic parts from the injection molding process supplies major manufacturers in the Pharma-Medtec industry. Gimatic now also has access to this know-how. This has created a network for the flow of information from mold production to the gripper system interface, which is fast and direct. Gimatic Managing Director Johannes Lörcher is also the owner of TG Ritter Spezialmaschinen. The company has been a consultant and broker for complex production systems in the pharmaceutical industry since 1958. Gimatic also benefits from the specialist knowledge of the pharmaceutical engineer employed here. He trains the employees there in terms of rules and regulations and they learn what makes customers in the industry tick and what is important to them.
In recent years, Gimatic itself has developed from a pure component supplier to a system supplier. The German company Gimatic Vertrieb in Hechingen has also built up extensive expertise in system construction for gripper systems for the increasing automation towards Industry 4.0. This is where gripper solutions are created for the automated removal of injection molded parts from injection molds. The high level of vertical integration ensures that the pneumatic and mechatronic components, sensors, sensor boxes and I/O-Link interfaces installed there are all made in-house.
NFC RFID technology is available for monitoring and saving all relevant gripper system data such as parts lists or drawings. Production data can be retrieved worldwide via the company's own Gimatic or customer cloud.
From standard grippers to individual indications
Gimatic has been supplying customized components for laboratory automation in large quantities for a long time. Series products serve as the basis for such projects, which are modified according to customer specifications with, for example, technical functional changes or adjustments to interfaces, color or labeling. Gimatic is flexible with its broad portfolio of grippers and mechatronics for handling and removing plastic parts from injection molding machines. From a simple standard gripper to a customized or modified gripper through to a larger OEM application designed very specifically in development partnership with the customer, everything is possible at Gimatic.
A good example is a robot application in Japan. Here, a GMP gripper is used to produce individualized medicine for cancer treatment. The robot selects the specific indication for a patient from a range of pharmaceuticals. It is then cleaned and prepares another indication.
Grippers for plastic parts with multiple cavities
Gimatic is working with Otto Männer to implement another outstanding application in the form of grippers for removing plastic parts from injection molds with multiple cavities. Such grippers remove, for example, inhalers, drug delivery solutions, home cars, hospital products or pipette racks. The difficulty here is often the high cavity of the molds. This increases the weight of the gripper. However, because often only small robots with a low payload are used for these applications, the focus here is on lightweight construction.
Such molds with high cavities create a bulky installation space. The position of the components must therefore be optimized for the distances between the cavities in the various thermal states. This requires a close exchange with the mold manufacturer. The interfaces and interference contours between the robot gripper and the injection mold are also considered together from the start of development. Gimatic's range for such grippers starts with small two-cavity or 2+2 molds and extends to very large versions. A project with 94 cavities in dimensions of 1,000 by 1,000 millimetres is currently underway.
There are also applications in which 16, 32 or even more components have to be removed at once. Each molded part is scanned individually by a sensor system and tracked from the time of removal. The pressure sensors and control systems are supplied by sister company Priamus. The sensors detect and select bad parts directly in the mold. The information is passed on to the gripper, which can then sort out the bad parts.
The new Pross three-point sensor from Gimatic is often used to check the status of components. It can be used to query three positions of a gripper at the same time. This increases the query options while maintaining the same weight and installation space. Angela Struck, Freelance Journalist / as
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