Besides steel profiles and beams, also round tubes are used as construction elements for structural steel industries. In practice, these profiles have large milling tolerances, resulting in large cutting deviations. KRANENDONK has developed special software to compensate profile tolerances giving exact dimensioned cuts. Since connections now fit much better, there is sustainable saving in welding hours.
Combined beam and tube cutting cell
Beam cutting functionality
Especially for H-beam cutting, KRANENDONK developed Dynamic Flexibility Production (DFP) software in ARAC, which automatically adapts the robot program to the tolerances in H-beams. Not only does the beam have to fit, but because the structure will have to be welded, also a welding bevel must be provided. The system is ready to cut typical T, K and Y connections required for full penetration welding.
Tube Cutting functionality
In order to join the tubes, special preparations must be cut on the branches to fit onto the main tubes. The correct angle of the welding bevel depends among others on the angle between the two tubes. This means also, that around the circumference of the tube, the welding bevel is constantly changing. This task can be fulfilled because the robot makes optimal use of its 8 axis’s.
Robot carriers for reach extension
Since sizes of products differ per customer different solutions for robot extension (tracks, columns and gantries) can be supplied. This means all axis of the robot carriers are controlled by the robot and therefore are able to work together as one coordinated system. If required the plate beveling functionality can also be supplied in multi functional systems.
ARAC software
One-piece production can be obtained by connecting the robot to the powerful offline programming software ARAC. The advanced ARAC software combines easy macro based programming of the robots with simple graphical online cell and process control. ARAC is able to interactively add the necessary processing information (CAM data) such as: which contours to process, processing speeds, process parameters, tool angles (e.g. torch angle) to create bevels. In case a CAD-interface is created, efficiency increases even more.
