Page 26 - MetalForming March 2017

In-Die Sensing:
Do It Now!
That’s the advice of a sensor expert who has seen more than his share of profit-eating die crashes, bad parts, and wasted time and material.
BY LOUIS A. KREN, SENIOR EDITOR
Improper feeding of sheet or strip into press tooling, improper part ejection from the press, slugs gum- ming up the press and dies. Has this ever happened to you? Had enough of tooling damage, scrapped parts, wasted materials and production delays? If any of the above puts a serious crimp in productivity and the bottom line, it’s well worth the time to investigate sensoring for part quality and die pro- tection. With state-of-the-art controls able to monitor and fine-tune press functions, backed by sensing technolo- gies and know-how that monitors every aspect of the press line, including detailed operations within the tooling, now is the time to investigate how sen- soring will improve performance, in new or existing press lines and tooling.
That’s what Dave Bird, key-account manager at Balluff Inc., Florence, KY, preaches as he travels the country vis- iting metalforming operations large and small to introduce, assess, refine and update sensing technologies for part quality and die protection. Recently, Bird—on the road visiting metalforming
operations, of course—laid out the case for sensoring to MetalForming maga- zine. With more than 20 years in the industry, Bird has seen companies in all stages of the sensoring process, and from all of that he offers this quick sen- soring advice: “Get on board!”
Robust and Future Friendly
“It is a matter of committing to sen- soring,” Bird says. “The technology is already out there, and it is robust. An application-specific, well-protected sensor may have a meantime failure of 100,000 hr., or 13 to 14 years...sen- sors will outlast the dies.”
Sensor technology also serves as the backbone of forward-moving manu- facturers. As manufacturing evolves into Industry 4.0, sensoring takes on added importance as part and parcel of information gathering and use. Whereas Industry 4.0 refers to the avail-
ability of all relevant data in real time as well as the ability to create optimal value from the data at any point in time, sensors and related identification systems ensure this availability. Net- working and connectivity technology allow data collected by sensors to be transported, providing basic informa- tion to higher-level systems or the cloud for analysis.
Commitment is Key
Back to commitment, Bird stresses the need for company-wide buy-in as well as specific personnel dedicated to the sensing and die-protection effort. The team must agree with and adhere to the new processes and procedures even though initially they may seem foreign or unnecessary. Make sure that everyone understands how a sensored process can eliminate errors and improve part quality. Without such
24 MetalForming/March 2017
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