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FANUC Robotics delivers faster results
with COSMOS
Company
FANUC Robotics
N.A., Inc. |
Industry
Machinery |
Location
U.S.A |
Product Used
COSMOSWorks™
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Type of Analysis
Linear Static
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The Challenge
FANUC Robotics North America, Inc. designs, engineers and
manufactures industrial robots and robotic systems. With locations
throughout North America, FANUC Robotics is recognized for quality
engineering, excellent customer service and cost-effective automation
solutions. Since 1982 the company has been a robotics industry
leader.
FANUC Robotics had been using Aries
for Finite Element Analysis (FEA). According to Senior Staff Engineer
Don Bartlett, their designs were done in 2D so parts had to be
modeled from scratch if they required FEA. The solid modeler was
difficult to use. The auto mesher also wasn't robust and rarely
meshed on the first try. In fact, significant simplifications
had to be made to the model to get it to mesh. The Aries solver
was also very slow -- the analysis of a simplified version of
the inner arm of a robot took 18 hours to run on a Sun Sparc 10
workstation.
The Solution
FANUC Robotics utilized the COSMOSWorks add-on to SolidWorks to
optimize designs. This combination made it easy to do analysis
and to change dimensions of parts where required which allowed
engineers to create better designs. Bartlett said with COSMOSWorks
it now only takes 15 minutes to analyze a robot's inner arm without
simplification on a high end PC.
Summary and Metrics:
- Reduced time to analyze a robot's inner arm without simplification
on a high end PC to 15 minutes
- Reduce the combined stress of the coupler by more than 60
percent, which met the required design life
- Reduced project time from 1 month to 2 days
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"I was given the project at 6 p.m. on
a Friday. The following Monday, my associates in Los Angeles
had their results. The parts were machined that morning
and running on our life test robot by afternoon."
Don Bartlett, Senior Staff Engineer |
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