Emerson’s New Ultrasonic Welding Platform Meets Challenges of Critical Small Plastic Part Assembly
IIoT-enabled Branson GSX Platform provides precise control for faster, repeatable, high quality welding of intricate components
Emerson has launched a new generation of ultrasonic welders that support the growing demand for the assembly of smaller and more intricate plastic components. The Branson GSX Ultrasonic Welding Platform is an advanced and intuitive flexible joining solution, designed to optimize and ensure quality welds, while helping manufacturers meet project timelines and deliver expected return on investments.
Plastic components across the medical, electronics, and automotive industries are becoming increasingly miniaturized, with embedded electronics, intricate designs and thinner plastic walls. Conventional welders with high or crushing trigger forces inhibit customers to safely weld small and fragile parts. To meet this challenge, Emerson has developed an Electro-Mechanical Advanced Actuation System that provides unprecedented control and position accuracy. This leverages Branson’s 70+ years of ultrasonic application experience and combines servo-mechanism, software optimization and Branson proprietary dynamic follow-through to enable a broad range of trigger forces to be applied, including the industry’s lowest, ensuring weld precision and control. The Advanced Actuation System also enables the GSX to improve position accuracy, leading to faster, high performance welding of very fragile and intricate components.
The highly configurable GSX welding platform enables customers to accommodate many different parts and application types by using an array of welding parameters and actuation modes during a single weld. This ensures better, consistent, quality welds leading to fewer rejects. Using a multicore processor and a linear encoder drive, the multi-tier advanced actuation system can be instantaneously adjusted based on real-time feedback. This ensures the same level of precision and repeatability across multiple welders.
The modular GSX Platform forms the basis for a wide range of models to be launched over the next two years, each designed to suit the needs of specific customer applications. The platform can be configured for all customer environments, ranging from standalone benchtop systems to semi- and fully-automated manufacturing lines. By offering easy integration into a digital environment and standardized transfer of relevant data, the GSX Platform is Industry 4.0/IIoT-enabled, providing access to actionable performance and diagnostic data, supporting production efficiency, traceability and maintenance improvements.
Increasingly challenging production timelines, that must be met to ensure a project’s expected return on investment, are inhibited by a loss of operator experience and expertise. Helping to bridge any potential skills gaps, the GSX features simple and intuitive software, supported by 4” and 12” touchscreen HMIs, which enable operators to perform faster, correct set-ups and reduce application testing time. This leads to faster start-up, by up to 60% in most application cases, with an assurance of weld quality and increased production efficiency. By retaining alignment information and set-up within the assembly, a GSX stack and tooling can be replaced in less than five minutes compared to conventional ultrasonic welders which can take over 1 hour. The ability to execute faster changeovers enables a variety of components to be welded with limited disruption to production schedules.
“To remain competitive, manufacturers must bring products to market faster to maximize profitability,” said William Vaughan, Vice President Global Marketing, Assembly Technologies, Emerson. “The Branson GSX provides six sigma levels of quality, repeatability, traceability and increased production throughput to ensure successful delivery of a product line’s expected return on investment.”
For more information about the latest Branson welding solutions, visit Emerson.com/Branson.
