Design And Research Of Material Handling Equipment Of Water-lubricated Bearing Flexible Manufacturing Platform

As the key component in mechanical transmission system, water-lubricatedbearings make full use of the advantage of new engineering composite materials whichare used to replace costly metal to produce water-lubricated bearings and are lubricatedby water instead of mineral oil. Water-lubricated bearings not only help to save a largeamount of oil but also help to avoid pollution brought by oil when it is used aslubricating medium. Therefore, water lubricated bearings have been widely used for itsadvantages of resource-conserving, eco-friendly, simple structure and high performance.In the mean time, the subject of how to realize automatic and highly efficientmanufacturing of water-lubricated bearings is gaining an increasingly attraction fromenterprises, experts and scholars. However, for a long time, after vulcanization moldingof water-lubricated bearings in vulcanizing machine, workers are needed to completeflatting end face, cylindrical turning and chamfering of water-lubricated bearings, whichresults in the low production efficiency of water-lubricated bearings, increase the laborintensity and lead to poor working conditions. Therefore, design of high efficientautomatic processing equipment to manufacture water-lubricated bearings has importantpractical significance. In this paper, a water-lubricated bearings flexible manufacturingplatform is proposed, the platform consists of a dual-arm robot, a CNC lathe, a feedingand loading system and two robot hands, and it can achieve flexible automaticprocessing of water-lubricated bearings. The feeding and loading system and two robothands need to be designed. The focus of this project is to design the feeding and loadingsystem and the robot hand, and realize automatic control of feeding and loading system.Main contents of this paper can be summarized as follows:①Common cylindrical workpiece material handling equipments from home andabroad are analyzed. According to the size, weight and shape of the water-lubricatedbearings, a feeding and loading system is designed to convey different types ofsemi-finished and finished water-lubricated bearings.②PLC is chosen as the control hardware core. Selecting other appropriate controlhardwares such as a touch screen, inverters, photoelectric sensors and relays constitute aPLC control system. Then control flow graph is drawn based on the needed functionand PLC ladder program is written to achieve automatic control of the feeding andloading system. ③Merits, demerits and principles of commonly used robot hands are compared.Accoding to the size and weight of water-lubricated bearings need to be grasped and thesize of mechanical interface of the dual-arm robot, a pneumatic robot hand to graspdifferent types of semi-finished and finished water-lubricated bearings is designed.④3D software, SolidWorks is used to establish the virtual prototype model ofpneumatic robot hand and carry out virtual assembly and interference analysis. Finiteelement software, ANSYS Workbench is used to execute finite element analysis of thepneumatic robot hand，the stress cloud of components of the pneumatic robot hand isobtained to check whether the strength of the robot hand is reasonable.⑤ADAMS is used to implement dynamics analysis to check whether clampingforce of the pneumatic robot hand meet requirements.