Strip feed and laser cutting system

 

Many industries use pre-punched or perforated product wound onto drums supplied by strip material converters. This requires set up, long lead times and the holding of considerable stock to match the economic set ups and delivery from converters. When the product may change and is in development there is the added problem of what forms to order minimum order quantities of the different forms and long lead time for tooling for converted pre-punched strip feed material, this can be a major development issue. Add the fact that the product is delicate, tension sensitive and may need to have the lengths changed in production due to tolerances on the rest of the product and conventional solutions become impractical.

 

The customer needed to repeatedly and accurately place a thin strip of PVC film onto the product during its build process. It was necessary to cut holes in the film for critical alignment onto location pins but without the risk of excess material migrating into the product. The film also had to contain perforations to allow tabs, used in a subsequent part of the assembly process, to be torn cleanly off. As the product itself was still undergoing further development during the time the assembly machine was being built (not uncommon in new products) the exact format of the perforations could not be finalised. The requirement also had to accommodate for possible multiple variations of products be used on the machine in the future.

 

GBI proposed, developed and delivered a programmable laser cutting system that would allow the exact size/ pattern and length of material to be created on demand within the machine just prior to placement on the product. This approach saved considerable time in the development of the product. Precision servo control of the strip tension and a programmable precision placement system were also included which significantly improved the product quality with the added benefit of lower production costs, whilst avoiding the need to use pre-converted punched strip in full production.

 

Additional benefits associated with this approach were; the removal of the risk of pre-perforated material detaching and falling into the process; elimination of the need for tracking of the repeat pattern; fast strip set up; and removing the need to deal with variations in the fragile strip caused by the variations in tension used by the converters.