Research And Development Of The Accumulating Pallet Conveyor

With the economic development of China, automobile industry grows. Growth of vehicledrives the development of the automotive equipment industry. Rising labor costs will makethe automobile production lines more and more automated. Transportation is the basis of allautomation. Only when workpieces are automatically transferred from one station to another,do production lines become automated. To sum up, China’s automobile industry has a verylarge demand for automated conveyor equipment.Accumulating Pallet Conveyor (APC) has two basic functions: first, it can transferworkpieces from one place to another; second, it is a buffer, it can store a certain number ofworkpieces. APC is normally used in loading stations and stations where subline transfersworkpieces to main line. Compared with common conveyors, APC improves the flexibility ofa production line and utilization rate of the other equipment.The pallet turning back type is adopted in this paper. Guided by the modular designconcept, the author divided the product into several functional modules: driving unit, mainbody, pallet, pallet driving unit, and stopper. CAD is used for detailed design of each structure.CAE is used for FEA and kinetics simulation. The core mechanism, pallet driving unit, canautomatically change between drive of friction force of the friction plate and drive ofengaging force of the ratchet wheel&pawl, which enables friction force drive for horizontaloperation of the pallet and engaging force drive for turning operation of the pallet. Besides,safety clutch in the driving unit prevents the pallet from damage even if it gets stuckabnormally.The author tested the prototype analyzed the failures and problems, and finally solvedthe failure of ratchet fracture, stopper stuck and friction plate wear, etc. The author alsodesigned two expansion application types, parallel dual bodies and series pallets, to solve theproblem of transporting wide and long workpieces.By optimizing the parts manufacturing process and standard purchase parts typeselection, the author used aluminum profile bodies, aluminum cast pallets and more economical rollers to effectively reduce the cost and increase the profit of the company,without lowering the quality.