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Project Portfolio

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The Steel Tube Institute of North America promotes the growth and competitiveness of North America's steel tubular products industry.  Learn more

 

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The Association for Manufacturing Excellence is North America’s premier organization for the exchange of knowledge in Organizational Excellence. Learn more

 
 

Featured Projects

  • material-handling
  • lean-assembly
  • scada
  • packaging

Machines and Machine Control

altAutomatic End Plug Machine

An automated material handling and conveyor system. AEC provided a turnkey machine, control system, and software package. Machine required extensive motion control and measurement, barcode reading, label printing, and interface to the customer's existing ERP system.

altAutomated Storage & Retrieval

AEC provided electrical and control systems engineering to upgrade a large storage and retrieval system with an absolute minimum amount of shutdown time. Extensive electrical and software pre-work allowed the upgrade to be completed during the customer's regularly scheduled ten shutdown days per year.

altFurnace Control System

AEC developed PLC and Operator interface code for numerous casting furnaces. The project involved not only extensive vacuum system and process control, but demanding multi-axis motion control to allow furnace operators to teach and play back a pour cycle. Extensive data collection is done thoughout the process to meet the lifetime traceability requirements of the parts produced.

altHigh Speed Vision Inspection

AEC provided a high speed, multi sensor, vision system for a printing process. The system monitored the quality of the product at each step of production. At the exit of the process line a single printer was used to mark any flawed parts which were detected.

altVision Assisted Assembly

AEC developed a vision based control system to perform laser welding of nuclear fuel rods. Vision sensors were used to control the position of the laser performing the welding as well as to acquire the serial number of the part being welded for traceability. Detailed data collection for quality assurance and regulatory compliance is performed during the welding process. Data collection rates can be as high as 10,000 samples per second for some parameters.

altPart Traceability and Marking

Traceability requirements on nuclear fuel rods require marking of manufacturing information on each rod. At the completion of the manufacturing process all required process information is uploaded from the system PLC by a PC operator interface. The PC stores the information in a remote SQL database as well as retrieving traceability information from the database. The traceability information is downloaded to the system PLC which permanently engraves the information on each fuel rod produced.