Abstract
The design of a control system for the material transport as used in gear-box flexible manufacturing system is presented in this paper. The scope of investigation covers material transport control , automatic vehicle, material exchange station, multi-storeyed warehouse system, NC and CNC machines and host computer etc. The paper describes the transport control system and its design, and briefly describes the communication among devices and warehouse access principles.
Introduction
The flexible manufacturing technology (FMT) originated in USA in the mid 1960s’, since then it has spread to many other countries. During the last few years, the flexible manufacturing system (FMS) has demonstrated not only popular in the industrialized countries, but also finds its applications in many developing countries. Nowadays, the computer integrated manufagturing (CIM) has become a hot topic in the field. In many countries, it can meet the demands for accelerating products development, improving quality of production, decreasing production costs and the period of designing products. Both industries and academic/research sectors are devoted to its development and applications .CIM is much more superior to FMS and is probably the direction of development in the manufacturing sector.
The evolution of FMS makes small batch production of wide varieties possible in a production set up of large scale size, A FMS generally consists of machining Center(CNC or NC machines),material exchange station, storage, material handling or transport system, cleaning station and robotics etc. All these components are controlled by their controllers which are connected to a host computer.
Under the control of the host computer, these components are connected to the material transport system. Materials flow in a pre-determined way in the FMS. The material transport system can determine different paths for different materials, tooling, semi-processed or finished products whether flowing into or out of the FMS. The FMS are essentially automated job shops and they should be able to process a large total volume of small to medium batches of parts.
