Productivity Improvement by Low Cost Automation in Manufacturing of Steam Turbine Blades

The Pick and Place robot is one of the technologies in industries and designed to transfer materials from one location to another. The system is very important to minimize human errors and to get more precise work done. It can also save the cost in long run and help to solve problems and tasks. The advancement of automation in the field of manufacturing has led to the innovation of varieties of Robots. Automation is a technology that deals with the application of mechanical, electrical, electronics, and computers to operate and control production. Pneumatic driven systems are widely used in industrial automation, mainly for relatively simple tasks with open-loop control system. The current project work is carried out for "Design and development of pneumatic pick and place unit for automatic loading and unloading of blades on a DMG machine". In the present situation, the loading and unloading of the blade is done manually by human interference in DMG VMC. This manual interference has led to high manufacturing lead time, high loading and unloading time, low machine utilization and low productivity. All these problems demanded for a material handling system.