Careful pneumatics assessments assist start-ups

Determining a common pneumatic parts list and agreeing the mechanical design and control architectures during the development cycle ensured production jig startups.

A unique approach to the development of pneumatic automation to assemble Land Rover's all-new Discovery 3 has helped the production line jigs to switch on with minimal disruption, and complete the critical early months of service with virtually no problems.

The new tactic came in the shape of a pneumatics expert - seconded from Festo - who joined the Land Rover Discovery 3 manufacturing engineering team early in the project's life.

Following the decision to standardise on Festo pneumatic components for the body-in-white and final assembly jigs for the new vehicle, Festo seconded one of its automotive specialists - Martin Brooks - to become full-time project manager.

Brooks joined Land Rover's planning team at the site in Solihull and used his expert knowledge to help the team devise a pneumatics strategy that ensured the pneumatic designs were optimised for reliability and maintainability.

Among the tactics adopted were: a common pneumatic parts list - selected for proven reliability and to minimise spares holdings; advising the automation builders on good pneumatics design practice to ensure both reliability and safety; and agreeing the mechanical design and control architectures during the development cycle.

This saw Festo working with some 10 automation OEMs for the final assembly and body-in-white areas.

All the pneumatic equipment was inspected for conformance and quality at the design stage before initial acceptance by Festo, and also as it arrived on-site for commissioning.

Most of the pneumatics chosen for this application came from component families that Festo already supplies to other leading prestige automobile manufacturers, and which have a demonstrable reliability record.

The Interbus-S fibre-optic fieldbus was used for almost all of the pneumatic equipment, apart from a few Profibus nodes that were implemented for special reasons such as compatibility with existing equipment.

This novel approach has certainly worked for Land Rover, and the pneumatics systems have now completed over four months of multi-shift use with only a handful of issues that were quickly resolved by Festo-trained Land Rover technicians.

"Managing a large-scale pneumatics automation project from the end user's perspective has been a valuable learning experience", notes Martin Brooks of Festo.

"The project demanded close co-operation with the machine builder OEMs to ensure that the extreme reliability that automotive manufacturers seek was built into the automation designs.

This aspect has given us a lot of insight into ways to make such programs run efficiently and to time.".

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