In a Danish meat processing plant, hundreds of knives need sharpening each day. To accomplish this task a robotic cell is installed. Inside the cell, stainless steel spring leafs fixate the knives in big cassets for the robot to retrieve them and re-insert them after sharpening.
Problem
When inserting the pointy knives into each set of spring leafs, the knife would often “bite” into the softer stainless steel. This would cause a collision bending both spring leafs and knives, in some cases causing defects on the robotic arm. This problem lead the tema to a monthly replacement of the spring leafs, which would bind up one engineer in two hours per cassette. Even under this maintenance regimes, however, collisions would still happen.
Solution
The team approached CeramicSpeed with a request to deliver a harder and lower-friction surface on the springs and a test was set up. The same spring leafs as always were used, simply coated by CeramicSpeed, with the same HardCoat solution often used on CeramicSpeed bearing parts.
Result
Now two years after the test was set up, the same set of spring leafs has been through more than 700.000 knives and are still spotless. This led to a notable decrease in maintenance cost as well as downtime cost for the Danish customer, proving that Coated Wear Parts provide an ideal solution.
