High-temp Material Handling Challenge

[eaglewood]

You didn't say how often you must reach in to get the container? That will determine how hot your retrieval arm gets and whether you need to do something with alloy steel or extra cooling.

In the interest of keeping it simple, is your arm just a fork type device that goes in and gets the container, lifts it slightly and pulls back out? You would only have one axis of motion, up and down.

Or must a gripper be involved? Obviously the fewer motions and linkages involved the better. I've seen robots with a ladle, dipping 1300°F molten aluminum, all day long. They hover over the molten aluminum when not in action so they get hot. Their tooling allows the motion actuators to be back a bit from the heat and I believe they have some forced air cooling routed to heat sensitive areas.

The 140 lbs at 10' is putting about 1400 lbs of torque on your base. Thats not counting the weight of your arm. Overall thats not much of a load. A small fork truck can handle that.

Let us know what you come up with!

Good questions and comments.

The arm is at current just a fork. It doesn't need to be a grabber, but we're considering moving up in the world from the fork to something that can perform more actions, including possible automation.

Right now, the fork enters the 1300F furnace for less than a minute, withdraws, then places the part elsewhere in the process. After withdrawing, the fork is outside the furnace at 70F or so for probably 5 minutes before re-entering for another minute. It repeats several of these cycles for 30-45 minutes overall before the fork (or future grabber/robotic arm) at rest for several hours.

Now thinking if we do use a robotic arm in the future, it might be good to have some sort of conveyor, track, or turntable to move the part to the edge of the furnace. That way, the arm would not be exposed to nearly as much heat, nor for as long, reaching into the furnace.