IR4 engaged with the team at TEI to provide a solution that was capable of fully welding all of the rotating screen trommels that TEi manufacture for the mining industry. Prior to engaging with IR4, the welders at TEi would be faced with spending many hours in difficult positions welding out the trommels.
In collaboration with TEi it was decided that the system solution should fully leverage the IR4 IP by implementing a machine learning level solution. TEi were seeking the flexibility of being able to process new variants of Trommel by simply importing the 3D model for that trommel. The IR4 software interrogates the model geometry and meta data within the model and then generates the robotic production plan to complete the welding out of the trommel with no further input required from the operator.
This software enables TEi to import concept models of trommels and the system will detail the production times and identify any welds that are unreachable due to plates being too close together. This then enables TEi to optimise design where practical to ensure the most efficient processing of the trommels.
Once the front end software has generated the production plans, the production software then automatically manages and coordinates all system movements to complete the welding of the trommels. The system will automatically account for out of position welds through replanning of the weld path trajectories after scanning the weld position.
The system as configured for TEi has a working envelope of 5.5M reach, 3M width and 4M in height with a rotator capacity of 9T. The working envelope is readily reconfigurable and can be adopted to various product processing requirements.
The IR4 system reduced trommel welding time from 64 hours to 13, and required less than one hour of operator time. Valuable skilled staff were then utilised elsewhere in the business while trommel output increased.
