SMC says one of the most recent additions to its comprehensive product portfolio is currently making waves – both locally and abroad – scooping up, for example, the award for Technical Innovation of the Year in the United Kingdom at this year’s Motion Control Awards.
Answering to the call for Industry 4.0 solutions, the Wireless Fieldbus System EX600-W is currently being used extensively in the food, beverage and packaging industries, and the response from the market has been overwhelmingly positive thus, says the pneumatics company.
According to Ming Liu, Head of Product and Pricing Group at SMC Corporation ANZ, this decentralised solution is EtherNet/IP and PROFINET compatible, can withstand electric noise and is suitable for harsh, industrial environments. “This wireless fieldbus system can manage both digital and analogue signals, as well as pneumatic products – making it a flexible solution for all applications.”
The EX600-W was designed to make robotic applications easier. “The EX600-W is small and light weight, fits onto the robot head, has minimal wiring, offers remote control and fault finding, among other features,” says Ming.
In noisy environments and harsh environments this unit remains steadfast he says.
“The EX600-W uses the 2.4 GHz ISM frequency band and every five msec frequency hopping. The noise resistance design makes it even suitable in welding environments”.
As a customer-centric organisation, SMC designed this unit with exact this in mind. This wireless unit ensures minimised installation, modifications and maintenance time. “The risk of disconnection and circuit breakage is also significantly reduced to both performance and productivity.”
The EX600-W products are compliant with the all applicable Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) requirements and have been registered to use the regulatory compliance mark
(the RCM) in AU and NZ.
The EX600-W gets the
thumbs up in Australia
In a recent success story, SMC collaborated with SunRice (Ricegrowers Limited) – a proudly Australian company with a footprint in 50 countries. SunRice is one of the largest branded rice food companies in the world. The company welcomed CopRice to its growing portfolio more than 40 years ago.
CopRice manufacture and supply quality livestock feeds. The manufacturing process includes rice brokens, rice bran and rice hulls which are supplied through the rice milling process.
CopRice’s primary Robotic Palletiser is crucial to their business. Used daily, this 500 kg payload robot is fitted with a SAS Fork tine gripper to pick and place stock feed SKU’s. With various sized bags needing to be palletised, the gripper tines had to be in different positions when picking up these bags to ensure that the best quality products are stacked onto pallets for customers.
In terms of the application, the robot gripper needed to adjust the gripper tines automatically for each SKU as it was being palletised. The problems that we faced in the past were a limited number of inputs and outputs, expensive fieldbus modules and failed solutions due to vibrations on the gripper.
Ricegrowers Engineering partnered with SMC to develop a customised solution for CopRice. As a recent addition to its portfolio, SMC’s wireless fieldbus system – the EX600-W – was specifically specified and customised for this application.
According to the customer, the EX600 was easy to install, affordable and that the technical and sales support were outstanding.
