Research On The Key Technology Of Differential Case Production Line Automation And Informatization Improvement And Its Application

Automation and informatization have become the vane of the manufacturing industry worldwide,and it has prompted enterprises that have begun to work at the industrial 2.0/3.0 level to actively invest in automation,informatization and intelligent exploration.At present,the industrial powers are actively deploying Industry 4.0,and China’s "intelligent" manufacturing is developing under this background.And traditional manufacturing industries have devoted themselves to equipment upgrades and software updates to cope with the transition to new from old economic engines and to catch the opportunity in the technological change of the enterprise.While the cost of direct replacement is too high due to the good overall condition of the equipment,it is necessary to carry out the automatic adaptability transformation of the old production line.However,some of the equipment has poor communication conditions,and all operations can only be achieved manually.Besides,the management cannot obtain effective basic data of the production line,which leads to the lack of monitoring and inadequate information management.In order to solve the above-mentioned problems existing in the current old production line,we have carried out the research and application of automation and information integration in the production line of heavy truck differential housing.Based on the production line of heavy truck differential housing,this paper completes the informatization and automation transformation of the line.In the automatic adaptability design and transformation module,a system solution is proposed,which mainly includes a six-axletree robot with a walking shaft,which cooperates with the FANUC vision system to realize automatic product handling and photo identification and positioning.Meantime,hardware facilities such as workpiece cache table（reversible）,chip processing device,manual sampling platform,etc.are designed to ensure the operation of logistics;in order to meet the long-term unattended operation and realize fully automatic production,an in-machine inspection device and a tool life management system is installed to count the life of the tool and realize automatic tool replacement.In addition,use the electronic control system of the production line to interact with robots,machine tools,sensors,PLC communications,etc.to achieve signal interaction,the program can be automatically switched according to the system signal,and the related system program can be synchronized to match the product to be processed to achieve seamless production change with high degree of flexibility.In terms of informatization and digital transformation,we designed and developed the bottom-level data collection and integration system software.From the aspects of production information,equipment information,quality,and personnel,information is captured to form the underlying database,which is updated in real time,and the decisionmaking layer can be monitored remotely.In terms of quality,the data measured in the machine can be collected and uploaded at any time.We have embedded the SPC into the entire information collection system software.The application of this design concept realizes the online processing and analysis of the SPC.Meantime,we have integrated the tool compensation function into the software,and the inspector can adjust and modify the remote tool variables outside of the line according to the inspection results.Through the transformation of the production line,the original four-person manual processing mode is changed to the current unmanned automatic production mode of automatic handling,automatic measurement,and automatic tool change.The transformed production line can remotely collect and analyze the output,quality,equipment,and personnel information of the entire production line in real time,realizing the monitoring and traceability of the entire production process life cycle.