Robotic Mold Sprayer

Premier Automation provided a robotic spray solution for a global supplier of tooling in the metals and mining industries. Their team was searching for an automated solution that could spray a specialized coating to their sand molds across hundreds of different casting types. With a single operator currently responsible for creating the sand molds, spraying the coating, curing the coating, and manually pushing the mold down their production line, they looked to streamline this process while maintaining a safe space for the operator to continue creating sand molds. The goal was to improve throughput, coating consistency, and safety for the operator.

This customer manufactures hundreds of product types. The following design constraints had to be accommodated:

• Hundreds of sand castings molds varying in casting geometry, depth, and quantity made consistently coating molds difficult for an operator
• Sand mold heights varied based on Copes and Drags
• Very harsh environment due to green sand, powder based spray, and other contaminants due to proximity to casting furnaces.
• Quick product change over necessitated a user-friendly interface and easily programmable system
• The coating being sprayed was very flammable.

Ultimately the environmental concerns, variation between sand castings, and programmability of the system were aspects that our team kept at the forefront of our design.

Premier generated several system arrangements for the customer’s consideration. The selected system arrangement consisted of the following components:

• A wall mounted Fanuc Paint Mate 200iA/5L robot.
• A custom manufactured tool to hold the C.H. Reed spray gun.
• A custom engineered robot structure for wall mounting
• Two Zeta Group roller conveyors for ease of part conveyance
• A multi position Festo actuator for moving along the conveyor line
• Hard guarding around the structure equipped with RFID non contact interlocks for system safety
• Motion path programs were generated to spray the part from multiple angles.
• Process adjustments for robot speed and motion path can be made through a local HMI.

• The system improves coating consistency by spraying the part from multiple angles, at consistent speeds and repeatable distances from the mold.
• Spray routine took 30s which sped up product throughput
• The system maintains a safe environment for the operator creating sand molds right next to the system