A set of ultra-large fully automatic flame wire spraying system designed and constructed by UCT Beijing for an important sector of China has successfully obtained the buyer’s acceptance recently. The system consists of fully automatic grit blasting and wire flame spray process, of which, the grit blasting system adopts advanced dust-free grit blasting equipment, the flame wire spray adopts the fully automatic closed-loop control. A combined booth for both grit blasting and wire flame spray has a size of 30 meters long, 9 meters wide and 6.5 meters high. Two ABB robots whose handling capacity over 200 kg with the arm spread of over 3 meters are installed on a track motion to carry out the grit blasting and flame wire spray. This is the most state-of-art thermal spray system ever built by the UCT.
The project achieves many firsts in the field of thermal spraying equipment engineering of China, such as adopting mass flowmeter to realize the fully automatic control of wire flame spray operation, adopting ultra-large ABB robots to automatically complete the grit blasting and spraying operation, adopting off-line programming of spraying profiles before spraying real parts, as well as the realization of accurate travelling and precise positioning of two large robots on a track of 28 meters long and the integrative management of foreground and background spraying operations.
The core systems for this flame spraying project including electrical controller, gases management center and wire feeding controller are all manufactured by UCT. The electric controller uses PLC and MMI, the gas management center and wire feeding units adopt the mass flowmeters to realize closed-loop control of higher precision. Since the first set of fully automatic thermal spraying control platform was manufactured in early 2015, it has been running stably in a large engine manufacturing plant of China, which proves that UCT Beijing already can manufacture the platform for fully automatic and multi-process thermal spraying operation which is comparable to that of western countries. This project is also the first time for a Chinese thermal spray enterprise to win the bid in an international equipment procurement project and obtain the final acceptance.