Finding the gap in the market. Every R&D manager hopes to make it happen. At Gilbos, they have succeeded with their Automated Creeling Solutions. With this installation, the company from Aalst can automate an important bottleneck in the production of carpets. In doing so, it is sailing an idiosyncratic course, even keeping the entire production in-house in order to strictly monitor quality. Thanks to TRUMPF's ecosystem, this is done efficiently and cost-effectively.
For more than fifty years, the textile industry has been biting its teeth on this. How can you connect two spools of yarn in an automated way so that the machine that processes the yarns from the spools can keep working? Piece of cake for an operator who just has to tie a knot in the tail of one spool and the beginning of the other spool. But a tall order to synchronize all those operations with robots. "And yet we now manage to do it better than the operator," Gilbos CEO Sigurn Vandenbrande proudly tells us. "With the current way of working, things go wrong in 3% of the cases. Our ACS achieves a reliability of 99%. Based on information from the field, we will hunt for the 100%."
Gilbos succeeded in this challenge by just not doing it the same way and by the drive of an exceptional team. Innovation is therefore in the company's blood. Vandenbrande: "Man is the most advanced robot that exists. But you can't do it to him to drag around a whole shift of coils that weigh 8 kilograms on average. Moreover, there is a tendency to run longer runs by using larger coils. Then we are talking about weights up to 25 kilograms. So being able to automate this process is more important than ever." Gilbos does this with specially developed carriers, which are patented with as many as 37 claims. The coils are loaded in by means of a robot and vision technology -two firsts for Gilbos. Two clamps at the top serve to hold the beginning and end of the yarn. Then, by cleverly tilting them 90°, the yarns are presented to each other as if by themselves and it is child's play even for the robot to connect them before they leave for the heatset line.
The workshop is busy building one such ACS machine that will soon leave for a customer in the United States. "He already has the first one running, now the intention is to automate his other heatset lines as well by the end of 2025." The machine is not only a handsome piece of engineering. It also looks good. "A trend already started under my predecessor, Erik Gilbos. Our machines have to have a face," laughs Vandenbrande. That beautifully shiny sheet metal comes from the machines in the workshop a little further down the road. Anyone looking past the machining department can already see the flagship: the TruStore 3030 sheet warehouse with a TruLaser 3030 Fiber with LiftMaster Compact coupled to it. "The intention is to run autonomously for a long time. Eventually all the cutting work for ACS can then be done at night, with no impact on the rest of our production."
The most recent addition is the Trubend 5170 S bending bench with ToolMaster. "Within a few years, half of our workforce will retire. With this machine, on the one hand, we are investing in securing bending knowledge. It has so much intelligence and gadgets that all pieces, from the first to the last in the series, are perfectly bent, regardless of tolerances in the material. On the other hand, we boost our capacity considerably thanks to automatic tool changes. While the operator takes the pieces away and goes to get new ones, the tools are already ready, without having to lug them around himself. The machine is so dynamic that we also produce competitively here. An ambition of Gilbos to keep our machines truly 'made in Belgium'," says Vandenbrande.
With the Boost software leading the way from loading the drawing to generating the cutting and bending programs, the sheet metal ecosystem within Gilbos works perfectly. "We really wanted to be able to keep doing this competitively in-house, because we intertwine production and R&D very closely. That offers incredible advantages for making your machines better in the future and making your production equipment even more responsive to that." The capacity Gilbos has left on its high-tech TRUMPF machines is not going to waste either. "We use that to subcontract to regular partners such as Aska Bikes (speedelecs), RoboJob (automation solutions), Pimm Engineering (charging stations), companies that all also believe in the power of a local manufacturing industry."
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