Auto feeding of Ceramic Rings for Centreless Grinding

Elscint recently manufactured a supplied an auto feeding system for feeding of ceramic rings to a centerless grinding machine. The requirement was to feed 5 types of ceramic rings of various dimensions, right from diameter 15 mm to diameter 50 mm and thickness varying from 4 mm to 10 mm. The internal diameter too varied for the various rings, but mostly being 8 to 12 mm less that the outer diameter. For feeding to the customer’s centerless grinding machine, the rings were required to be fed axially. Due to the huge variety, to make the changeover between the rings easy, Elscint manufactured a special bowl made in cast aluminium with the changeover tooling being in stainless steel for each of the rings. As the rings were having less thickness, there was a tendency of their toppling over. However, the tooling developed by Elscint ensured that this did not happen and the rings were fed in a stack to the grinding machine. Additionally, a linear vibrator with tubes was provided to accommodate different sizes of components for further feeding to the centreless grinding machine. This provided a constant pressure and push to the parts when they entered the grinding machine. The bowl was coated with Elscinthane PU coating, ensuring that the noise level was less by eliminating the contact between the bowl surface and the components. The complete system was mounted on a stand having height adjustment of (+/-) 100 mm to ensure that the outlet tube can be aligned to the machine work-rest, whenever the ring size changes. The equipment was built and installed at the customer’s end, resulting in a productivity improvement of almost 30% over the manual process. You can watch the video of this feeding system for feeding of dia 50 mm rings and the video showing dia 20 mm rings