18 Reliance Cool Muscle motors were recently used by Labman Automation, a laboratories and industrial robotic solutions specialist, in its new automated bottle inspection system design
Bottles travel to one of nine test stations and are photographed and weighed to check bottle condition and filled volume.
Passing these pre-requisite tests the bottles are barcode scanned and a Cool Muscle motor lowers a mechanism to check the cap tightness and to tighten the cap, if necessary.
All tests passed, the bottles travel into the main bottle handling system.
Reliance Cool Muscle is an ingenious small servo system, encompassing an integrated vector drive, amplifier, controller, H-infinity tuner, 50,000 count magnetic encoder and a 0-3000rpm high torque motor into one intelligent motion control solution, which allows a multitude of functions from just one motor.
The ability to measure and change the torque, on the fly, permits the checking and setting of bottle cap tightness.
The high torque/speed properties, superior to many of its rivals, made it the ideal motor for driving the ballscrew axis that handled the bottles between conveyor belts.
This coupled with the ease of integrating the motor with existing control electronics and the simplicity of programming the motor, made its selection an easy decision.
The project manager for the system design, Jamie Marsay, has been pleased by the performance of the motor: "All in all the motors were the first choice for this application and for many future systems to come."
