The factory TULSKY BRICK PLANT located at Tula city, Russia had 2 cutting lines, 2 chamber dryers and a Hoffman Kiln and has planned a capacity upgrade to meet market demand. The bottleneck of the process was the loading of the kiln which was done manually, slowing down significantly the whole process and making it quite dependent on labor.
Sabo designed and installed a new automatic setting machine able to create packs that can be transported directly to the Hoffman kiln with the use of forklift. The line was designed to produce the typical Russian bricks 1, 1,4 and 2,1 NF. The solution involved the collection of dry products from both chamber dryers. Special attention has been paid to the possibility of handling different products coming from the two dryers at the same time, a feature that increased significantly the flexibility of the plant.
The line involved the setting machine together with the handling of the dryer laths after their unloading from the dryer. Robotic systems where used in both the receipt of dry materials and their setting. This allowed for designing a highly reliable line that would be able to fit the particular stringent constraints of the available space. The line started after the unloading elevator. One Fanuc Robot with a specially designed gripping tool is unloading four rows of dry bricks per cycle on each of the two following programming benches. Each programming bench can handle different products. The empty laths are then handled and stored by a separate mechanism, so that to be ready to be transferred again in the line. The programming benches have the possibility to revolve the bricks and create different packing schemes according to the needs. A second robot receives the newly programmed layer and puts it on two different conveyors that are handling wooden pallets ready to be transferred near the Hoffman kiln.
Despite pandemic restrictions the line was installed to December 2020 - January 2021 following both the timetable, the safety guidelines of the assemblers and the close cooperation of the local personnel.