Robotic waterjet cleaning system from KMT Robotic Solutions helps General Electric to reduce costs and improve productivity

Citation

(2009), "Robotic waterjet cleaning system from KMT Robotic Solutions helps General Electric to reduce costs and improve productivity", Industrial Robot, Vol. 36 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2009.04936baf.002

Robotic waterjet cleaning system from KMT Robotic Solutions helps General Electric to reduce costs and improve productivity

Article Type: Mini features From: Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Volume 36, Issue 2

KMT Robotic Solutions has delivered a new robotic waterjet cleaning system (Figure 1) to General Electric’s Engine Services facility in Strother, Kansas in the USA for stripping thermal sprayed coatings from jet engine components. Thermal coatings, made of ultra-fine grained metal alloys or ceramics, are applied to protect the base material of components that are exposed to heavy contact with other rotating parts.

Figure 1 The Stationary IV Stripping system supplied by KMT Robotic Solutions

Complementing General Electric’s position as the world’s leading manufacturer of large jet aircraft engines, the Engine Services division at Strother is responsible for repairing, overhauling and performing general maintenance on new and used aircraft engine components.

The customised Stationary IV Stripping system supplied by KMT Robotic Solutions features an overhead rail-mounted ABB IRB-2400 robot with a KMT Rotojet cleaning head, CleaningWare software and a Streamline SL-V 100R Plus intensifier from KMT Waterjet. Mounted next to the Rotojet is a search probe to ensure the part is in the cleaning area and an air nozzle to remove water from the part after it is stripped.

When refurbishing a thermal coated part, the team at GE Strother must first strip the original coating and then reapply it to its original thickness. The KMT system has replaced a waterjet stripping machine used for the past 12 years by GE Strother which used a closed loop filtering process to remove the stripped coatings. Although this process was effective, GE wanted to find a suitable replacement system that would eliminate the difficulty and associated costs of the closed-loop waste filtering process. During closed-loop filtering, the water used to clean the part is continuously recycled through a series of costly filters.

“KMT worked hand-in-hand with GE Engineering to develop an efficient, open-loop filtering system for stripping process waste”, said GE Engine Services Special Process Engineer, John Segovia. “This included great outside of the box thinking and simple ideas for a complex problem. The additional robot axis was very beneficial to our stripping process. We constantly acquire new and different parts to repair. Now we’re only limited by the size of the cell, and not by the type of part that needs to be stripped”.

According to Mr Segovia, the new open-loop filtering system, which uses fresh water from the plant’s water supply has reduced water filter costs by 75 per cent. Productivity and cycle time have also been improved, enabling GE Strother to process 25 per cent more parts than its previous capacity. The company has also realized additional savings in training costs and uptime.

KMT’s CleaningWare software makes the system easy to program and operate by improving human-to-machine communication and adjusting water pressure to minimise wear on the high-pressure tubes and hoses.

Operators load parts into the system with the help of a telfer crane, or by hand. Once the part is loaded onto the rotating table, the operator scans a bar code that automatically calls up the correct stripping program. The water used to strip the part is pumped through the cleaning nozzle at very high-pressure via a KMT Streamline SL-V 100R Plus intensifier.

Based on the company’s market-leading Cutting Box systems for waterjet cutting and routing, the Cleaning/Stripping systems from KMT Robotic Solutions offer efficient, fast and accurate removal of a large range of surface coatings, greases and other substances without damage to metal surfaces and other substrates. As in the case of the GE machine, KMT Robotic Solutions can supply customised systems based on the dimensions of the part to be machined, the number of parts to be cleaned, the required cycle times, the plant environment and to meet budget and running costs.

As well as removing coatings on aircraft engine components, KMT’s cleaning systems can be used in many industries, from removing paint on fixtures used in curing ovens for automotive bodies and removing excess polyurethane and other plastics from injection mouldings to cleaning blades in refurbishment work on diesel turbines. Typical applications include the removal of thermal barriers, dimensional spray, anti fretting plasmaspray, abradables, scale and oxides, paint, glues, rubber type coatings, carbonaceous deposits and even radioactive coatings.