Over the past couple of years some of South Africa’s provinces have been subjected to heavy hail storms, raising interest in products that are resilient to nature’s bullets. Festo was asked to assist the SABS with a solution to automate the movement of its hail gun, designed to pick up ice projectiles and fire them at a solar panel to establish its resistance to impact.
“Our solution included both pneumatic and electric drives and a customised control panel,” explains Festo sales engineer Johannes Ngwenya. “A pneumatic vacuum generator was used to pick and place the projectile from a barrel canister. Once it was in place, an L-port valve is activated to switch the vacuum off and open positive air which fires it against the solar panel.
“We required movement in 1 mm increments,” says Herman Strauss of SABS, “electric drives have proven to be best suited to this application as they provide the fine motion control we needed.”
The hail gun needed to be attached to X, Y and Z axis positional drives to give the required degrees of freedom to the system. “The mass of the gun and the panel dimensions helped us to size the electric drives and the required stroke,” says Ngwenya. “It was decided to use the ELGA toothed belt drive which is ideal for linear gantries and cantilever axes.”
Control of the system was provided by the compact CMMO-ST motor controller which serves in both closed and open-loop modes. It offers quick easy parameterisation through either the Festo Configuration Tool (FCT), as was done with this application, or via an Ethernet interface with integrated web server. The cost-effective CMMO-ST forms part of the Festo range of optimised motion solutions products with ServoLite technology.
Installed on each drive is the versatile EMMS-AS motor with a choice of three feedback systems to allow for single or three-phase operation. This high performance series is designed for demanding drive and positioning tasks where small accurate incremental movements are required.
The system was built in Festo’s Isando workshop and delivered within eight weeks.
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