With its advanced composite wheels attracting growing demand from some of the most prestigious car manufacturers in the world, Carbon Revolution worked with Automated Solutions Australia to streamline its manufacturing operation.
Growing from a small engineering start-up to a world leader successfully manufacturing to the exacting quality standards of leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), Carbon Revolution is exactly the kind of high-tech, innovative company that the Australian manufacturing industry needs more of.
The Carbon Revolution story began at Deakin University in the mid-2000s, where a group of engineering students, staff and industry mentors had begun developing carbon-fibre wheels for teams entering the Formula SAE student motorsports competition. In 2007, a group of them decided to try to commercialise their work, and with a small federal grant the company was formally established. Dingle came on-board a few months later.
Today Carbon Revolution operates from a purpose-built facility on Deakin’s Waurn Ponds campus, in the suburbs of Geelong, Victoria. The company made its ASX debut on 29 November 2019, with its lightweight carbon fibre wheels now being used by some of the premier car brands in the world including Ferrari and Ford.
Automated Solutions Australia (ASA) has built a strong relationship with Carbon Revolution over the last four years, collaborating on multiple projects to automate the company’s manufacturing processes. ASA has been a well-matched partner, drawing on years of specialisation in automated paint applications for the automobile industry and applying this expertise into other dispensing and machine-tending applications in Carbon Revolution’s production process.
Automation and industrialisation of manufacturing processes are helping Carbon Revolution to meet the exacting demands of its customers. Carbon Revolution is meeting this challenge by increasing its throughput and constantly honing and redeveloping its production methodologies. This has been possible by analysing current processes and identifying areas that cause bottlenecks in the overall manufacturing process, as well as pre-empting potential future bottlenecks as production output increases.
One of those bottlenecks identified is the Manual Deflash process, which is where the excess resin and fibre are removed from the wheels after the moulding process. Prior to automation, the process involved manually removing excess resin and fibre with files and sandpaper. Manual removal is very labour-intensive; in addition it poses significant potential for injury as the resin in certain parts of the wheel is thick and sharp.
Carbon Revolution decided that it required a process development robot cell that would enable its engineering staff to develop best practice around automatic removal of the resin and fibre. It was a challenge that ASA resolved with a cutting-edge solution using six-axis force sensing and profiling of the part for path generation.
A M710iC/50 robot was employed for the task, complete with Fanuc’s Severe Liquid and Dust Protection (Foundry) option, which provides IP56 protection on the main body and IP67 on the outer arm and wrist. The robot and a Fanuc single-axis positioner table controlled as an integrated axis of the robot were mounted to a common, heavy skid base to provide rigidity and the ability to relocate the cell within Carbon Revolutions’s ever-evolving plant. The cell is a polycarbonate enclosure construction with sub-floor dust collection and a dust extraction system integrated into the base structure.
The robot was fitted with Fanuc’s integrated Force Sensor coupled to a Pushcorp Spindle tool with automatic tool changer (ATC). The ATC allows the robot to change tools using industry standard BT30 toolholders. The cell features a seven-position tool rack with interlocked access doors for both the robot and operator, allowing tools to be changed by the robot in the middle of the process depending upon the current cut profile and whether it is a roughing or finishing cut that is being undertaken. Tools can also be serviced or changed over by the operator and returned to the tool rack. Those tools are subsequently measured with the robot using the Fanuc force sensor to automatically recalibrate the tool.
The Fanuc Force Sensor solution is a highly fine-tuned piece of equipment, which serves more purposes than recalibrating the tools; for new path programming, the robot is directed to a spoke “window” and then set to create its own path by moving to an adjacent edge and then profile tracing the window. This method is used to create the nominal path, which is traced in production with the actual cutting tool applying force feedback provided by the integrated force sensor.
Before machining, the force sensor allows the robot to accurately probe the wheel by touching several pre-defined locations to judge if the wheel loaded corresponds to the program that it is about to perform and to accurately measure the orientation of the wheel, adapting the process to the actual orientation. During machining, the force sensor performs a contouring function to accurately machine high-tolerance sections of the wheel.
To deliver the best outcome for Carbon Revolution, ASA sent two of its team to the USA to undergo specialised training on the use and implementation of Fanuc’s Force Sensor technology and to bring this highly advanced programming technology back to Australia for this project.
The cell is controlled by an Omron NJ programmable logic controller (PLC) with integrated safety to provide communication to the robot, to the plant part traceability system for product-related data, and to the plant’s Ignition-based supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to report process feedback in an effort to meet the latest Industry 4.0 standards. A touch-screen Ignition human-machine interface (HMI) was also included to provide a control interface for the cell, also acting as a diagnostic terminal.
The main benefits to Carbon Revolution of this deflash process, using cutting-edge force sensing technology, has been the increased throughput that the company has managed to achieve as a result. By removing the bulk of the resin and fibre robotically, it has provided a significant reduction in the time and effort required to finesse the wheel.
The successful results achieved by this technology has meant the development cell is now just another step in the process that delivers world’s best wheels – from Australia to the world stage.