Customer success story“The gripper does exactly what it should do”

In an increas­ingly elec­tri­fied world, power elec­tronics play a major role. The aim is to make elec­tric drive systems as effi­cient as possible in order to use energy econom­i­cally and sustain­ably. State-of-the-art power elec­tronics, such as those produced by Semi­kron Danfoss, are of central impor­tance here. The company’s semi­con­ductor compo­nents, power modules and stacks are used in sectors such as auto­mo­tive engi­neering, trans­porta­tion and indus­trial systems, and renew­able ener­gies. There, they ensure that energy is used effi­ciently and there­fore econom­i­cally.

Hanno Bruss is a Test Engi­neer at Semi­kron Danfoss in Nurem­berg and sums up the situ­a­tion as follows: “Our aim is to offer high-perfor­mance elec­tronic modules so that users can reduce their CO₂ emis­sions.” Bruss sees “zero-defect produc­tion” as a basic prereq­ui­site for this. All elec­tronic compo­nents supplied by the company must func­tion one hundred percent. “Every single module that is produced here under­goes compre­hen­sive func­tional checks.” To achieve this quality stan­dard, Semi­kron Danfoss relies on measure­ment and testing tech­nology with a high degree of automa­tion.

On the track for measure­ment

The elec­tronic compo­nents travel towards the indi­vidual measuring stations on a narrow conveyor belt. They are tested for various para­me­ters on the six-meter-long track: static, optical, tactile, dynamic and elec­tronic. If every­thing is OK, a laser station labels the parts and they are ready for ship­ment. But how do the compo­nents get onto the conveyor belt in the first place? Hanno Bruss explains: “The linchpin of this system is the contin­uous and secure feeding of compo­nents from a robot cell.” He clar­i­fies: “The gripper is there­fore of partic­ular impor­tance.” Semi­kron Danfoss has opted for the mecha­tronic parallel gripper EGU in size 50 from SCHUNK. A SCARA robot removes the compo­nents indi­vid­u­ally from the blister tray with the gripper and places them on a narrow conveyor belt to feed them to the down­stream measuring cell.

Stroke, weight and short distances

The measuring system is fitted with a highly diverse range of differ­ently sized elec­tronic compo­nents. “That’s why we need a long gripper stroke from very short to long, from around 30 to 110 millime­ters,” says test engi­neer Bruss, “I took a long hard look at the market, and tried out various prod­ucts myself. Thise flex­i­bility of the SCHUNK gripper was a deci­sive factor in the selec­tion.” In addi­tion, the parallel gripper is below the upper weight limit of the robot appli­ca­tion. And some­thing else was impor­tant to Bruss: “A short start-up distance. Because we have to drive into a pretty tight space here. Other grip­pers on the market required at least three to four millime­ters of start-up distance, which was too much for us. The EGU doesn’t need any start-up distance at all.” Main­taining the grip­ping force in the event of a voltage drop and the ability to inte­grate and monitor the EGU easily were addi­tional argu­ments that persuaded Semi­kron Danfoss. “The gripper has met all our require­ments and offers us process reli­a­bility. It does exactly what it is supposed to do, and it fully exploits the advan­tages of servo-elec­tric grip­ping tech­nology in this appli­ca­tion.”