Autospool

Joel E. osuna

Working in at the Cubic manufacturing plant in Tijuana, I noticed how easily it could be to mistake the cut of a piece of wire from a spool. On one occasion, the manufacturing and assembly of one of the electrical systems for a traffic control apparatus was halted because one of the required wires was mass cut to 11 inches when it needed to be 12 inches. This gave me the idea of creating an automized spool and cut system for electrical wire.

Overview

Given that this is an individual idea for a mechatronic system that with a user input, automatically outputs the required length of wire, the project is still in concept form. As of now, I have done many calculations to generate a code that allows the computer system to accurately cut the necessary length of wire required. The idea is that a user can insert the desired wire spool, then on a user interface input the length of the necessary cut and the amount of cut pieces desired. Once the used has finished defining the inputs, the machine will automatically spin the spool and cut the wire at the desired length in a very rapid fashion.

Efficiency

The whole purpose of creating an automized system is to eliminate human error and increase the efficiency of the process. While doing trade studies to find what motor would be best for this system, I created a spreadsheet that allowed me to visualize with data the efficiency of the machine as compared to a human working on the same process. I analyzed three different stepper motors with maximum speeds of 50, 12.5, and 15 Rotations per second respectively and using arbitrary wire and spool numbers(Assumed 14ga wire, 5 in desired length, and 1 layer of the spool), I obtained the average time it would take the Autospool to measure the desired length at the motor maximum speed.

In addition to this, I also did some empirical testing to find the time required to measure a piece of wire by hand and found it to be approximately 10 seconds. For all three of the motors, I found that the time it would take the Autospool to measure the desired wire length would be on average less than 0.04 seconds or about 244 times faster than measuring by hand.

Using the previous calculations I was able to calculate the number of pieces of wire that could be measured in a perfect 40 hour work week. On average, by hand a single worker could measure about 14400 pieces of 14ga wire with a length of 5 in, while the Autospool could measure an average of 5 million pieces in the same amount of time.

Calculations and Formulas

For the necessary computer code, proper mathematical functions and variables had to be determined. Using these, the Autospool will accurately be able to measure and cut the desired piece of wire.