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Pneumatics system upgraded for hail testing

ENHANCED HAIL GUN
A pneumatic vacuum generator was used to suck an iceball through a barrel canister

ENHANCED HAIL GUN A pneumatic vacuum generator was used to suck an iceball through a barrel canister

17th October 2014

  

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Industrial automation and control company Festo recently assisted statutory body the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) – whose testing activities include a wide range of testing, calibration and inspection – to automate its hail gun for testing solar panels against hail damage.

Over the past couple of years, Gauteng has been lashed by heavy hailstorms, raising interest in products that are resilient to the impact of hail. Festo was tasked with assisting the SABS with a solution to automate the movement on its hail gun. This gun is designed to pick up an iceball and shoot it at a solar panel to establish the products endurance to the impact of hail.

Festo sales engineer Johannes Ngwenya says Festo’s solution includes pneumatic and electric drives and a customised control panel for the system. A pneumatic vacuum generator is used to suck an iceball through a barrel canister. Once the iceball is in place, an L-port valve is activated to switch the vacuum off and open a pressurised air line to propel the iceball at the solar panel.

SABS manager Herman Strauss explains that the SABS required movement in 1 mm increments, employing electric drives for this application, “as it provides the fine motion control we needed”.

The hail gun needed to be attached onto X, Y, Z positional drives so that the iceballs could be directed at any point on the solar panel. “The mass of the hail gun and the panel dimensions of 2 m × 2 m × 1.5 m helped us to size the electric drives and the required stroke,” says Ngwenya.

It was decided to use a toothed belt drive, which provided an ideal axis for linear gantries and cantilever axes. Additionally, this electric drive delivers speeds of up to 10 m/s, acceleration of up to 50 m2/s and a repetition accuracy of up to 0.08 mm.

Control for the system was provided by a compact motor controller, which serves as a closed-loop and open-loop position controller. It offers quick, easy parameterisation through a Festo configuration tool, as was done with this application, or through an Ethernet interface with integrated Web server.

The cost-effective motor controller forms part of the Festo range of optimised motion solutions products employing ServoLite technology.

Edited by Megan van Wyngaardt
Creamer Media Contributing Editor Online

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