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Chris Elston

Fanuc Weld Robot Work Cells

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I have very limited experience with welding robots. But a lot of experience with Fanuc. This question is posed to those that have integrated robotic weld cells... 1. Are there any dangers you can tell me with using weld robots? Grounding issues? 2. Does welding affect other hardware such as VFD drives or PLCs? 3. How do you insure the weld process doesn't affect third party controls? 4. Besides installing weld immune sensors, is there any other tips you can give you learned about integrating your first weld cell? 5. Do you have any experience using other servo axis to introduce the unwelded part into weld the cell and then the Fanuc robot welded the part on the servo controlled axis? The welding environment will be spot weld, verses arc weld, which I think is more controlled being that the current is controlled through the clamp.

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1st Question; Resistance or Mig/Tig Welding Answers to some of your questions 1. Robot to Controller has ground cable on Fanuc Green / Yellow striped. Always way to long, Trim this cable to exact length just to reach base. Extra coiled wire can act like a antenna. We run additional bonding ground cable to the welding gun frame and tie this back into plant ground grid. On resistance welding our transformers are at gun end so the 480v primary side runs through external RB harness. If you have a primary cable that rubs a hole in the insulation then the 480v pulse will feed back through the pulse encoder shields( gnd) back into the controller, always resulting in fried , driver, controller, and sometimes additional boards So be sure to bond gun or Transformer and robot base. Ask me how I know this..... 2. Seen no direct effect to drive or PLC except through external devices 3. Ask third party, guess it depends on their construction 4. Weld immune sensors have a place, usually dealing with Mig/Tig , Can't put them everywhere due to so many variations. In resistance welding due to the strong magnetic pulse associated with weld pulse lots of times this causes the sensor to blink OFF to ON or ON to OFF. We usually add a contact in the PLC that mutes the affected sensors while the HEAT cycle is on. This basically cancels the sensor switch during the actual weld cycle. 5. Use multiple external axis for part move in and out as well as shifting around for weld point access. Just use good grounding or isolation, depending on the type of welding controller and type of weld. Hope this has helped a little, we have around 1000 robots , doing all types of welding, laser cutting, plasma cutting, and assembly, running around the clock 5 days a week, See you deal with Fanuc's , I have been working with Motomans for almost 15 years, now have switched to Fanuc over the last 3 years, headed back up to Rochester Hills next week for the Advanced Programming Class. Guess we have around 900 MM and 100 or so Fanucs. Just turned 30 new Fanucs over to production in the last couple of weeks. Got about 85 new DX series Motomans in route from Japan right now, gearing for production in Jan. Edited by dococ

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