Deutz, the oldest engine factory in the world, develops, produces and sells a wide range of high-quality liquid-cooled and air-cooled engines, which are used in construction and agricultural machinery, stationary equipment as well as commercial and rail vehicles. As the industries supplied place special demands on the material quality and condition of the engines, Deutz checks its procedures, production processes and tools in every detail. They must be optimally tailored to the individual components and be as economical as possible. System availability, failure rate and process quality are consistently set in relation to technical and economic aspects.

The challenge of component diversity
The company was looking for an optimized automation solution for deburring the cheeks of crankshafts for six-, eight- and twelve-cylinder industrial engines. Together with its partner Mühlbauer Maschinenbau, a solution for the technically complex process was finally implemented. 13 different crankshaft types, nine different crankshaft lengths and three different mounting sizes for the positioning unit require flexibility. The variety of components also makes things tricky - the different crankshaft types have to be picked up without long set-up times and additional set-up components and must be able to be processed automatically with consistently high quality. For this task, it was clear that a robot with serial parallel kinematics should be used.

The results of automation include process optimization and high product quality with consistently reproducible results - even after processing several components. The robot deburring cell with an IRB 2400 robot in the special foundry version at its heart makes the production process flexible. It enables different types of crankshafts to be picked up - from 52 to 118 kilograms in different lengths. The set-up process has been optimized to such an extent that no changing units are required for the crankshaft type change. Mühlbauer Maschinenbau has solved this problem by means of an adjustment and staking system so that the change from type one to type two, for example, can be carried out quickly.

The software application challenge
Deburring is an important step in the crankshaft manufacturing process chain. Component positioning is crucial to the outcome of the process. If this is not exact by just a tenth of a millimeter, this has a negative effect on the machining of the crankshafts. Mühlbauer Maschinenbau has therefore worked with ABB to develop a solution for this process step. The crankshaft is moved into the cell from above. In this position, the crankshaft is picked up by a lifting unit and clamped on the machine table by a triple chuck and a tailstock is fed from the opposite side. The robot then follows the defined path for deburring the cheeks with the utmost precision and deburrs the contours automatically and repeatedly using a pneumatically driven milling cutter. The tool can be deflected in all directions in order to carry out the deburring process efficiently and safely and to keep the programming effort to a minimum. Thanks to the precise motion simulation in the offline programming and simulation program Robotstudio, motion programming has been greatly simplified and the commissioning time reduced, despite the complex component geometry. At the same time, the cell also communicates with the loading and unloading portal for integrated process monitoring.

Further projects planned
Overall, with robot-based automation at Deutz, Mühlbauer Maschinenbau and ABB are demonstrating a way in which small and medium-sized companies can also benefit from maximum flexibility and future-proofing. Investments become more profitable and the productivity of machining production is sustainably increased. Mühlbauer Maschinenbau is currently also implementing five other systems with ABB robots, including another major project for Deutz for the automated final cleaning of crankshafts; ABB's hardware and software solutions are also being used here. pb