RÜBIG Industrial Furnaces designs and produces tailor-made heat treatment furnaces. Both RÜBIG’s “MICROPULS®” plasma nitriding technology and the “GASCON” gas nitration process confirm RÜBIG’s status as global reference in this field. To be able to produce in a future-proof way, companies more and more automate the charging and discharging operations of heat treatment plants. A complete system solution, combined with perfectly balanced cycles reduces manual labor to a minimum. Thereby deep knowledge of service providers of manufacturing processes is essential as well as their experience and economic approaches. Investments must meet today’s requirements, but at the same time have to be ready for the industrial future. In other words: Industry 4.0. Still small but enormously growing markets in the already large automation spectrum are complete system solutions for heat treatment plants.
Case study Automotive.
More and more car manufacturers are faced with the task of applying high-quality wear protection on transmission components while coping with short cycle times and high production quantities. The solution from RÜBIG is an autonomous system in which only the batching plate has to be loaded manually. The rest of the work is done by a specially designed manipulator. This gripper picks the fully loaded batching plates and places them precisely in one of the nitriding plants. Alternatively the plates will be placed on a buffer table. A rotary lifting table ensures an ergonomic method of manually loading of the batching plate. Pneumatic operation enables step less adjustments, which greatly facilitates filling. Modern, powerful PLC programs allow beginners to obtain suitable values to create recipes via proven standard parameters. Experienced users on the other hand are offered an instrument to carry out all changes to the control parameters themselves. Data logging as means to view ready-made and user-defined trends, simplifies quality assurance. All settings and process data are real time logged – thus guaranteeing 100% traceability. Of course, comfortable “reordering per click” is possible from this platform! Constant technological progress in the field of plasma nitriding technology, which is used in a wide range of industries, from automotive to contract heat treatment, aviation and wind power, have taken the company to the forefront in international competition.
