Universal Balancing Designs
State-of-the-Art Propshaft Balancing System

Responding to customer needs, Universal Balancing designed a completely new machine geared specifically to the requirements of today’s automotive industry. Central to the design concept was the use of state-of-the-art motion control and fieldbus technologies provided by Rockwell Automation.

UNIVERSAL RADICALLY RE-EXAMINES MACHINE DESIGN
Cost-effectiveness and production efficiency are absolutely essential attributes of successful automotive components manufacturing businesses. But equally important is the quality of the finished product. The balancing tolerance required of rotational components such as propshafts and rotors has reduced sharply in recent years. Meeting the challenges of low cost of ownership, production efficiency and high-accuracy required Universal Balancing to radically re-examine machine design. The result of that process was the KISS-234 – a state-of-the-art propshaft balancing system designed to be both competitively priced and superbly adapted to the needs of the modern automotive industry.

COMPETITIVE PRICE POSITION
Despite a price tag at or below that of equivalent two-plane machines, by adopting the latest techniques and technologies, the company has produced a machine capable of balancing a wide variety of components in either two, three or four planes, and with flexibility, reliability, ease of use and cost-effectiveness as its key features. The KISS-234 consists of up to four support bearers – the exact number being dependant on whether the machine is operating in two, three or four plane mode – mounted on a precision-ground machine bed. The workpiece is driven at up to 6000rpm by compact spindle motors specially designed by Universal Balancing for ease of assembly and servicing. Integral medium-frequency weld heads are used to automatically position and weld corrective weights to the workpiece to correct imbalances in up to four balance planes. A high degree of production throughput is made possible by the combination a unique safety shackle design with automatic clamp and release tooling. The addition of a cost-effective auto-unload option can increase productivity still further.

HEART OF THE MACHINE
At the heart of the machine lies a powerful 10-axis Allen-Bradley Control Logix controller, which combined with Universal Balancing’s UNI-44 balancing instrument and proprietary Winbal software, allows the balancing operation to employ a high degree of process automation to improve productivity. A typical production cycle begins with the introduction of the workpiece into the machine. The automatic tool clamp then locks it into place and accelerates it up to speed. The UNI-44 balancing instrument determines the degree of correction required and indicates to the operator what weights to add to each of the four independent welding heads. The machine then indexes the shaft to the correct position and welds the weights into place in a single operation, before spinning the shaft again to check the correction has been effective.

The KISS-234 is also capable of vector split operation, where the machine automatically attaches identical weights at multiple points on the shaft to achieve the required balance. In this mode, no operator intervention is required making this method ideal for fully automated or “lights-out” operation.

CONTROL LOGIX MOTION CONTROL
The Allen-Bradley Control Logix system provides the motion control to manage the welding guns and indexing of the workpiece, along with additional functions such as automatic unloading operations. With its 8mb of on-board memory, the 1756-L63 processor inside the Control Logix platform is ideally suited to such applications, allowing a large number of machine configurations to be preprogrammed for instant recall. Rapid set-ups can be easily achieved at the push of a button, allowing different component types – ranging from simple rotors to multi-link propshafts up to 3m in length – to be processed in a single shift with the minimum changeover downtime. The machine’s HMI has been seamlessly integrated with Universal’s UNI-44 instrument and Winbal software environment to allow the operator to check balance test results and select different machine options from within a single interface. Along with its innovative use of CNC laser and flame-cut components, the adoption of EtherNet/IP and SERCOS fibre-optic outputs to control the servos has allowed a significant reduction in construction costs. The bulky wiring looms required by analogue I/O have been replaced by a single digital connection which is both cheaper and far more efficient. And thanks to the greatly reduced wiring overhead, construction time has been reduced by up to 40%, bringing about a dramatic improvement in lead times.

DETAILED DIAGNOSTICS
The use of EtherNet/IP enabled Allen-Bradley hardware also allows far more detailed diagnostics and monitoring of machine components such as the motors, weld heads and support bearers. As well as greatly assisting pre-emptive maintenance procedures, the extensive use of Ethernet-based components allows Universal Balancing’s engineers to connect remotely from anywhere in the world and analyze the performance of each individual component.

HIGH-QUALITY AND REDUCED LEAD TIMES
Reduced lead times and construction overheads do not have to come at the cost of achieving a high quality product. As the KISS-234 demonstrates, with Allen-Bradley hardware and Rockwell Automation know-how to provide the fulcrum, the needs of efficiency and performance can be perfectly balanced.

Contact RECO Unibal for a total solution for all balancing requirements - by telephone, email, web, remote diagnostics and attendance on-site by one of Universal Balancing's global service engineers.