Precise handling of workpiece carriers

The client
Our customer is a company from North Rhine-Westphalia, which is specialized in the fields of automation and special machine construction. With innovative and customer-specific solutions, it acts, among other things, as a supplier for the automotive supplier industry.

The challenge
ALFOTEC GmbH is known as a specialist for the internal material flow of heavy unit loads. Usually customers and interested parties come to us with tasks that require intelligent engineering and high manufacturing quality for the development, production and assembly of individual, turnkey conveyor systems. With this order, on the other hand, our customer already had very concrete ideas about his plant, which was to be used as the basis for a fully automated production line with work stations. The goods to be conveyed were special aluminium plates weighing a maximum of 60 kg each. These were to function as workpiece carriers, which were to be transported on the L-shaped production line to several work stations arranged one behind the other. At these stations, the workpieces placed on the carrier plates were to be further processed by robots and machines, so that the highest precision was required in the production and operation of the conveyor system – whereby the control and safety technology was the responsibility of the customer. A further challenge was to collect the oil on the workpieces along the entire production line, which is a major factor in production.