Design of automated and cleaner production line for wheel hub in automobile manufacturing

The manufacturing of automobile wheel hub plays an important role in transportation field. However, the existed production line of wheel hub was inefficient and unfriendly to the environment, which could not meet the requirements of automation and sustainable manufacturing, due to usage of manual operation and mineral cutting fluids. Therefore, an automated production line of wheel hub is designed in this paper. A feeding and blanking system, which layout is expandable, is composed of racks, transfer robotic arms and conveying rollers. Firstly, the workpiece could be grabbed precisely and efficiently to fixed point, thanks to axially arranged suction cups equipping on gripper. Secondly, a self-centering special clamp for inside/outside circle cutting is designed, in which four claws are controlled by pneumatic synchronisation circuit. The clamping force could be set up adaptively according to cutting force model, in which workpiece material and processing parameters were considered. Finally, to achieve green manufacturing, minimum quantity lubrication devices are embedded in the manufacturing unit and the traditional flood lubrication is replaced. As a result, the production efficiency of the automated production line is increased by more than 22%, based on the average production beat.