Manufacturing has evolved over the years to where factory workers of merely a generation ago would find it hard to recognize the cleanliness, efficiency, and increased safety at many of today’s most up-to-date manufacturing facilities. Yet many manufacturing processes remain inherently dangerous.
SureFire LLC is involved in manufacturing high level, reliable flashlights for military, law enforcement, and consumer use. As are many companies, SureFire is taking many manual manufacturing processes and turning them into automated processes.
This involves smaller robot applications, where robots assemble various parts of a flashlight. In this process not only the manufacturing process and efficiency are key, but also the compliance with applicable safety standards. In a new automated process, new technology is used that is improving the way to troubleshoot and diagnose the system to reduce downtime.
“A robot workcell contains a number of safety devices, including E-stops, light curtains, and safety gate switches, all designed to protect operators and other personnel on the plant floor,” says Daniel Fischer, SureFire’s vice president of assembly operations. “I was looking for a programmable device to not only monitor processes, but to replace six to eight safety relays. This would make the equipment easier to configure and would also require less wiring in the control box.”
After contacting Pilz, Fischer was introduced to the PNOZ multimodular safety system. The system consists of a base unit that includes a chip card that communicates with various safety devices, while also sending signal out for annunciation of the status of the Safety System. Users of the PNOZ multisystem can save more than 40% of engineering, installation, and maintenance time and costs.
“Our benefits are that we are able to replace between six and eight safety relays in every machine we build, so there’s less wiring and less hardware, which translates into cost savings,” Fischer says. “It is easy and intuitive to operate, making configurability a simple matter of drag-and-drop on a PC. And if a robot workcell ever needs to be modified, the ease of changing configurations is a real time-saver.”
Overall, the benefits to SureFire as an end user equate to shorter engineering and installation times, while achieving unquestioned security in monitoring all safety requirements. “We did the analysis, and Pilz was perfect for our application,” states Fischer.
