Heat Exchanger

Customer:

Manufacturer of Aircraft Engine Heat Exchangers

Background:

Heat exchangers are made of a special aluminum alloy and manufacturing process that yields short lengths of tubing. These varying lengths of tubing are main components of the heat exchangers and need to be burr free and stress free. The Ultracut-S CutSheet Function provides the ideal way to cut and easily change and optimize cut lengths for the short stock tubing lengths (aproximately. 33"- 39"). However, the time spent to load and to sort the cut tubing was too long.

Manufacturing Challenge:

Design and build an automated process to assist the loading of short length tubing and to sort the cut lengths into specific bins.

Solution:

Everite Machine Products standard product offering of the Model UltraCut-S Electrochemical Cutoff was fitted with custom fixturing and automation to address the challenge. Everite's engineers designed a custom loading mechanism and a discharge sorting machine. The UltraCut-S features a CutSheet option that was expanded to provide "CNC- like" part programming to enable easy access to the sequencing required for the loading and sorting operations.

The process consisted of a load fixture, where 21 tubes were manually loaded while the previous tubes were being cut. All loading is done external to the machine, while the automatic cycle continues to operate. The operator would acknowledge the completed load and the system would grab the tubes and present the tubing to the cutting fixture. Manually the operator would index the loading fixture to eject and load the tubing into the cutting fixture. Once again the operator would acknowledge the loading and the cutting sequence would proceed to automatically measure, cut and sort the tubing into the programmed storage and/or scrap bins. Utilizing this Everite custom design solution significantly increased the overall throughput of the Ultracut-S cutoff for this application.