When it comes to part presentation on a robot and/or pick & place mechanism you may want to consider using a feeder bowl to successfully present your parts. Hand loading has many restrictions for a typical station that requires the operator to be at a safe distance away from any moving parts. It’s important not only to just look at safety restrictions but also guarantee the pick & place has enough parts buffer to meet each cycle. Providing a fully automatic feeding solution is the best way to successfully solve this problem.

Integration

Existing single station and multi-station lines can easily be integrated with a parts feeder system. Our builders and engineers design these systems to work with the existing tooling and fit within the already existing real estate footprint. Making the system robot friendly is a critical area that our team is very familiar with. Some of these requirements may include providing enough clearance for the customers gripper to successfully pick one part a time.  Or providing a dead nest track section for a robotic EOAT pickup point. 

Positioning

FCI Vibratory Bowl Feed Systems can be modified to feed in a left hand(counterclockwise) or right hand(clockwise) configuration depending on where the track outlet needs to be positioned. Other modifications like rotating the hoppers to one common side or adding “L” shape plate cutouts can make things easier to fit an existing cell. This keeps things ergonomic and allows for a seamless installation. 

Controls

Need to monitor each feeder through an HMI? How about getting signals back for a low hopper or low track? Our controls engineers can provide the right contact signals to allow for seamless communication into the feeder controller. Some of these signals may include dry contacts, low voltage input switching for controller on/off,  and remote input for external speed adjustment/frequency adjustment. Other I/O options are available upon request for controlling each feeding station.

It is very important not to overlook the material part contact surface of a feeder. In older days the industry once used cast iron and cast aluminum for the bowl construction. Through years of hard use feeder companies began to see significant wear using these materials. The metal-on-metal contact caused friction which is why those materials did not hold up very well. That is why all of our FCI builders only build with 304 and 316 Stainless Steel. The wear strength and hardness of stainless steel makes it a perfect choice for any feeding project. It is a hard-enough material to trust in the field, but also still has the flexibility to be re-worked and repaired.

Using stainless steel construction on a vibratory feeder improves the overall life of the tooling setup and basic bowl features. Some applications such as food and pharmaceutical parts feeders can benefit from this finish as well. Keeping our system rigid and reliable is our main goal for any project that leaves our doors. That is why we elect to use stainless steel and heat-treated steel inserts on all of our feeders so they can perform well in the field after constant use.

If you have a really abrasive part, you can elect to coat your bowl feeder in polyurethane or Rhino LINE-X liner coating. The Line-X coating is the same coating that storm chasers use on their vehicles when driving through the eye of a tornado. Unlike polyurethane it is virtually bullet proof and has worked coast to coast on many truck beds you see today. The addition of any coating on your feeder gives you the added wear protection and assurance. In the event that the parts do wear through the coating it is unlikely they will wear through the stainless-steel sidewalls and tracks. If that were to ever occur, we could burn out the old coating, sandblast, and then recoat with a new coating.

Check out some of stainless steel vibratory feeder bowls on our YouTube page today!

Vibrating bowl feeders can benefit from using various coatings in the industry. These coatings have various uses and perks such as durability and part-friendly surfacing. One of our most popular coatings is the Surlyn thermoplastic powder coating.

The best way to describe surlyn is to visualize the coating of a golf ball. That is exactly what they use and it’s the only way to hold up against heavy blows from continued use. Standard polyurethane holds up well but sometimes it doesn’t fit certain applications such as food grade systems and abrasive part contact. The surlyn offers outstanding corrosion protection with a high impact strength and good weathering capability. It has been used for over two decades and meets the FDA standards for direct food contact. A vibratory parts feeder coated in surlyn can also withstand temperatures from 200 degrees Fahrenheit all the way down to cryogenic temperatures.

We have implemented this coating on many medical and food safe systems. To this date we have never had to re-coat any surlyn bowls in the field. The wear resistance and tensile strength is phenomenal. That is why many of customers elect to choose this coating for the main part contact surfacing.

This is just one of our many coatings and options you can chose to add to a system. Offering this optional coating allows us to work with many industries and also ensures we meet the standards on critical vibrating parts feeding applications.

As one could expect, a vibratory feeder is not quietest piece of equipment around. Sound waves are produced with vibration, parts colliding, and metal-to-metal contact. These sounds echo off the steel and conical walls of the bowl which can amplify across a wide area. This kind of interference makes things difficult for production managers and operators that must work around the equipment.

That is why implementing some sound reduction features may be usefully on your next feeding system. The average vibratory feeder system includes polyurethane liner inside the bowl which does help to alleviate the metal contact of the parts from the hopper loading tray and bowl tooling. If the bowl does not have poly-u, then it is bare stainless-steel bead blasted. This type of finish creates the loudest noises you will see from a feeder. To take preventive measures you can look at (3) options to reduce the sound of your system:

1. Add an aluminum sound enclosure with sound proof foam and hinged roof access.
2. Add poly-urethane liner to the bowl for sound reduction.
3. Add sound curtains around the entire machine to contain the sound waves.

Some additional sound may be the root cause of a poorly tuned drive unit also. Drive units that have broken springs or hammering coils can cause a loud banging noise. To fix this issue the unit must be retuned properly so it is a resonant “hum” you would hear from a typical feeder drive unit.

Nobody likes a noisy system in the plant and it’s no fun working around those types of systems either.

Please ask us about our sound reduction options if you feel it may be needed on your next project.