What Is a Bowl Feeder?
A bowl feeder is a device that vibrates the workpieces fed into a bowl to align them one by one in a fixed directional posture before feeding them to the following process.
It consists of a bowl (shaped like a bowl) section, an area for aligning workpieces, a hopper section that automatically replenishes the bowl so that there is no shortage of workpieces, and a chute (also called a rail or trough) section that sends the workpieces aligned in the bowl to the machine in the following process.
Bowl feeders can supply workpieces automatically, automating and saving labor on the production line.
Uses of Bowl Feeders
When automating a production process using FA equipment such as robots, bowl feeders supply parts in a particular direction so that the following process can easily pick them up.
Bolts, screws, and washers can be fed into the bowl feeder and supplied to the following process in an assembled state.
Also, easily entangled workpieces, such as springs, can be separated one by one with a separator and fed to the following process.
Bowl feeders can also have multiple functions, such as a foreign matter inspection function.
Principles of Bowl Feeders
Bowl feeders can feed products in various positions, and the feeding speed can be adjusted by the frequency at which the bowl vibrates.
Non-conductive workpieces such as resin come into contact with each other and rub against each other due to vibration, generating static electricity, which can cause them to stick together due to Coulomb force.
The problem is that the vibration causes a lot of noise, but recently there have been low-noise, vibration-free bowl feeders that use motor rotation instead of vibration to align and feed the workpieces.
The bowl feeders’ shapes match the workpiece, and the bowl feeder itself must be changed when it is changed. Therefore, they are suitable for feeding identical workpieces in large quantities over a long time but not for small quantities of many different products.
For small quantities of a wide variety of products, it has been proposed to use a method in which workpieces are arranged appropriately and conveyed on a conveyor. A 3D vision sensor is used to recognize the shape of the workpiece, the clamping position is determined, and the part is clamped.