Case Studies
Adhesive Dispensing Integration
A pneumatic dispensing valve and vacuum table laying rectangular adhesive beads onto sheet material.
What we looked at first
For dispensing work, whether automation pays comes down to how repetitive the bead pattern is. Here the sheet carried twelve rectangular frames in a four-by-three grid — identical in shape, fixed in position. That fits.
If every sheet carried a different pattern, or if the sheets themselves warped, we would have solved the holding problem before discussing dispensing at all. The vacuum platen is in this cell for that reason, not because dispensing needs one.
Equipment
Pneumatic dispensing valve A stainless barrel with a fine needle, fed by a blue air line; pressure drives the adhesive out.
Vacuum table The bed is perforated and holds the sheet flat under suction. This matters more than it looks. Any lift in the sheet changes the distance from needle to work, and the deposited volume moves with it.
Locating clamps Stainless bars help register the sheet.
The work
Rectangular adhesive frames are laid onto sheet material along a programmed path. The second half of the video shows the result: twelve rectangles in a four-by-three array, each drawn from a mix of continuous bead and discrete dots.
What makes this hard
Dispensing quality depends on three things staying stable at once: dispensing pressure, needle-to-work distance, and traverse speed.
Let any one of them drift and the bead breaks, floods, or varies in width. The vacuum table addresses the second. Path and speed planning address the third. The first comes down to matching air pressure to the properties of the adhesive.
More detail
Which adhesives we can handle, minimum dot size, cycle time and the sheet sizes we can cover are assessed against the actual requirement.