AUTOMATION OF MANUFACTURING CELLS FOR AUTOMOBILE ASSEMBLING Marcelo Ramos de Albuquerque Barros e Gilmar Ferreira Batalha
Resumo: The brazilian automobile industries experience an increasing need of manufature automation, production volume and flexibility when compared with the former lines. This paper aims to present a successful case of technological innovations adopted for the launchings of new vehicles focusing specifically the assembling of their bodies in white(BIW) by LASER joining cells. Here one of the most significant innovations has been the introduction of a Nd-YAG LASER beam source on the joining process, adopted in order to improve the finishing quality of the roof joining and assembling quality. The development of these new cells has demanded brand new conceptions and designs in order to assure a world class geometrical and metrological quality control during the whole cycle. They operate 16 robots, one controller and security subsystems, quality control, diagnose and communication operating on heavy duty conditions under a massive application of LASER process. Their architecture is based on resources optimization as well as on Lean Manufacturing concepts, resulting on improved reliabilities, operability, lower down times, higher flexibility and product quality. The cell control description emphasizes the main controller structure (PLC) and its logic based on SDE (Systems of Discrete Events) and a LADDER standardized block language. This standardization hasn't only allowed for an improvement of the reliability and economy of resources regarding scale effects as well as code flexibility, but also has improved the faults detection during the whole assembly process. It is explained how the HMI (human machine interfaces) interacts with the others levels of the production systems, i.e. how the supervisory operate into them.
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