Plastic hot air staking works for ABB Metering
A
Phasa Developments product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Mar 20, 2002
The cost-effectiveness of Phasa plastic hot air staking is being exploited by ABB Metering in the manufacture of moulded impeller assemblies used at the heart of its range of commercial water meters.
The cost-effectiveness of Phasa plastic hot air staking is being exploited by ABB Metering in the manufacture of moulded impeller assemblies used at the heart of its well known range of commercial water meters.
As part of a design improvement programme, the new technology has been selected to replace hot swaging production methods with a more capable system for the assembly of these precision metering units.
"The update reflects our company's policy of continuous improvement", explains ABB Manufacturing Engineer, Andy Roberts.
"The impellers are rotated by the fluid flow.
By mounting small magnets at the end of their shafts, it is a simple task to measure the number of revolutions - and as a result, determine the metered volume accurately".
"Previously, a thrust pad, spacer and sapphire stone bearing were located over the magnet drive worm at the end of the impeller shaft.
These were then secured in position using hot swaging methods", he continues.
"Location of these parts into a moulded recess was an intricate and time-consuming operation.
What's more, it was not easy to control the swaging process to ensure consistent results".
In the event of faulty processing, recovery of the expensive components and the loss of the impeller moulding was a cost that had to be borne.
The new design encompasses four different sizes of product, which, with the exception of the location nest, all use common processing tooling.
Accordingly, operators can change between any of the different sizes in the range and be back in production in less than a minute.
The equipment's specification not only called for a method of sensing that the process parts were present, but also gave Phasa engineers the task of confirming the correct orientation of the magnets in respect of their polarity.
Although this was initially envisaged as a mechanical sensing operation, subsequent research using Hall-effect devices has yielded a far more robust and totally reliable sensing method.
By using hot air staking, ABB has been able to simplify the design of the impeller assemblies - not just to reduce the parts count, but also to take advantage of the fastening method's inherent productivity benefits.
"Adoption of Phasa methods has also effectively de-skilled this production operation", adds Roberts.
Yet the effects of incorporating plastic hot air staking do not end there.
"The benefits range from improved processing times and product quality to reduced manufacturing costs.
It's a major improvement over our previous methods - which, of course, is the acid test for any new design", he concludes.
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