Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-16-2022

Publication Title

Manufacturing Letters

DOI

10.1016/j.mfglet.2022.07.015

Abstract

A single robot-based manufacturing system for unattended machining and inspection of graphite bipolar flow field plates for proton exchange membrane fuel cells is designed and integrated for demonstration and validation. Unlike most robotic manufacturing systems where an industrial robot is used for tending an automated tool such as a computer numerical control machine, in the present system the industrial robot performs all manufacturing operations, including machining the flow fields on both sides of the plates, changing the tools, handling the plates, vacuuming the plates and the workholding device of graphite dust, flipping the plates, air blowing them and performing machine vision inspection for quality control. The toolpath for robotic machining the flow fields and the manifolds are generated offline using Roboguide simulation software. The manufacturing system uses an integrated machine vision inspection process as a diagnostic tool for in-line checking the presence of machined features and in-line verification of feature dimensions. Besides the considerably lower capital cost compared to other automated manufacturing systems resulted from the elimination of the automated machine tool, the proposed robotic cell has the advantage of better managing the abrasive graphite dust resulted in the manufacturing process. The limitations of the proposed robotic cell are assessed and recommendations for further development are considered. The manufacturing system is demonstrated as part of a larger endeavour of bringing to readiness advanced manufacturing technologies for renewable energy devices and responds the high priority needs identified by the U.S. Department of Energy for fuel cells manufacturing research and development.

Comments

Georgia Southern University faculty member, Vladimir Gurau co-authored Robotic Manufacturing System for Unattended Machining and Inspection of Graphite Bipolar Flow Field Plates for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells.

Copyright

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Peer-review under responsibility of the Scientific Committee of the NAMRI/SME.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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