Design And Development Of Wheel Hub Manipulator For Spray Production System

Hub production is an important part of the automotive industry. In one wheel hub factory in Jiangsu, as the production line is obsolete, the operations of painting and drying of hubs are separated as two production lines. And the hubs have to be transferred from painting line to drying line after painting. This operation is now conducted by workers manually. In the workshop, there are lots of dust, paint and noise, what’s more, the hubs are very heavy, which hurts the health of works. The aim of this paper is to analyze the situation and to design a device to transfer wheel hubs from painting line to drying line.This paper firstly analyzed the production status of the factory, and proposed that the wheel hub automatic transfer system is divided into two parts:the drying rack fixing device and the wheel hub carrying manipulator. The fixing device is used to fix the drying racks for a short time as an auxiliary device, and the carrying manipulator is used for carrying the wheelhub.Through analysis of different schemes, this paper uses this mechanical structuresc heme:the fixing device uses a gripper, a reciprocating mechanism and an electromagnet; the carrying manipulator uses the structure of cylindrical coordinate manipulator. The lifting structure and the end effector are improved.In the end, the programmable logic controller (PLC) is used as the control core. Structure design and type selection of motor, cylinder and other components of the drying rack fixing device and handling equipment are carried out. Based on this, the paper analyzes the equipment working process, designs the electric circuit and the gas p neumatic control circuit. All this makes preparation for the line transfer of wheel hubs.