Robot-assisted welding use case: Calpak pilot line

In the robot-assisted solar tanks Calpak production environment, maintenance has two main goals:

1. prevent unexpected breakdowns which will lead to the long delay of the production in a specific period of the year and
2. determine the remaining time until the welding robots stop granting the required quality level of final products

The distinguishing factor is that the time when the second condition is reached is usually shorter than when the first is met. Production equipment components may degrade in condition but keep on working. Nonetheless, the overall quality of their usage will violate quality thresholds.

Since all the major moving components of the robot concur with the quality of the welding, a PdM strategy has been deployed for each of them by modelling a digital twin for the whole robot. Furthermore, a dedicated vision system has been deployed to monitor the quality of the welding. By proper combining predicted maintenance tasks with the estimated production plans (which are denser during summer), the PROGRAMS solution reduce the possibility of incurring unacceptable quality degradation during the whole year.

PROGRAMS solution reduced the overall number of unexpected maintenances stops and the length of maintenance activities during summer while still minimizing the overall maintenance costs. The OEE was brought to 95% thanks to the higher Availability (increasing of MTBF and reduction of Mean Down Time)