Machine to Disentangle Wires Properly 1

[Gustavo Silvano]

Hello there!

I'm an Electrical Engineer here in Brazil, currently working on a steel mill plant. I'm working on the wire drawing sector.
Our main problem is to disentangle wires to process them. So we have wires that range from 8 mm to 10 mm of diameter.
This disentangle is currently being made by our operators, but this take too long and make them busy, when they could being doing other things.
Do anyone have some problem similar to this? And have anyone a good solution for this?

Best Regards!

Gustavo

 

[MikeHalloran]

Don't let them get tangled in the first place?

I.e., why are they just laying there all bundled together?

Look upstream, to previous processes/shipment, and prevent the tangles there.




Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[Compositepro]

There are bar feeders available, but I am not aware of any practical machine that can disentangle long slender rods that are piled-up and tangled together.

 

[Gustavo Silvano]

They get entangled as result of the hot rolling mill process. They have to transport the wires to our area, and to do that they use a crane.

Once we used a vibration table to try to disentangle them, but it make such a noise and wasn't efficient.

 

[MikeHalloran]

So, the bars are not just piled up, they are pulled together at the centers and then whipped around and tangled by using a crane with a choker sling to transport them?

Who designed this process? Have you had them checked for mental disease?

Have you got a budget to set up, say...
... a dedicated conveyor to carry the bars one after another, flat and straight, from the rolling mill to you? It need not be physically wide, except for what structure is needed to support the belt.
... a flatbed cart as long as the bars, equipped with 'comb' structure so the bars won't be able to contact each other and entangle during transport? ... and a tractor to pull the cart?
... rolling the bars into circles, or coiling them onto spools, at the rolling mill, and unrolling them at the drawing machinery?
... pulling the bars on a boat trailer behind whatever truck you can commandeer?

How did this come to be your problem?
Are you actually empowered to do anything about it,
or are you just screwing around with ideas?






Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[KENAT]

Even if you can't go fully auto/integrated like Mike suggests, how about some kind of guides or fixtures or similar that they get fed into from the hot rolling mill & then transported in over to the next machine?

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[Gustavo Silvano]

So let's go.

I'm from the wire drawing area, and the wires that come from the hot rolling mill is used to produce column mesh. And the disentangle is taking much of our time, cause it uses a lot of hand work.
I'm an engineer and improving my process is my duty, so this is why I came to this problem.
We can try to improve the hot rolling mill process, but the wires used in my area is much less than those that are directly sold. With it, I can say that it will be difficult to change their process.
Is just that I needed an idea on a machine or device that we can build here to solve this problem.

Thanks to all replies.

Gustavo

 

[MikeHalloran]

You're still looking at the wrong problem.

How do the rolling mill's customers feel about having to disentangle their crap?

Fix that problem, and yours goes along for the ride.


Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[JNieman]

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of pain 'fixes'.

 

[dhengr]

Gustavo Silvano:
You need to provide much more engineering layout and design info. before you are going to get any meaningful engineering discussion, instead of just wild guessing. 8-10mm bar stock coming from a hot rolling mill is pretty good sized wire by our terminology. How long are these bars? How many per bundle? Are the bars just loosely intermixed in the bundle or are they actually bent and twisted together, some maybe not even useable? These are raw stock for your wire drawing process, right? If you laid a bundle down on a long enough flat, steel decked table, wider than needed for the whole bundle to lay flat in a single layer...., then rolled the loose bundle, side to side from above, wouldn’t the single bars tend to seek the flat steel table top in a single layer. Maybe a few bars would have to be untangled by hand. Alternatively, put the bundle on the flat steel table, with a strong steel bulkhead btwn. the bundle and the first step in your drawing process. Pick up the end of one bar and pull it through an 11mm slot in the bulkhead; drop a small gate piece over the top of the 11mm slot, so as to inhibit any other bundle bars from being pulled through the bulkhead; and pull the single bar out of the bundle, endwise; and repeat, and repeat, to feed your drawing dies.

 

[lukin1977]

how long is each bar?
do you need to take them out from the bundle one by one?

 

[Gustavo Silvano]

Here as some other pictures from the process. If it you can see how the bars entangle.
The bars have 12m and they need to be taken from the bundle four by four.

 

[MikeHalloran]

Did those parallel tranzfer chains used to have teeth on them?
That would be my fist step.

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[3DDave]

It looks like pulling them one at a time lengthwise would be easy to do; have a machine with driven pinch rollers above one end of the pile so a worker can just pick one end into the rollers that drag the rod off to a stacker.

I don't see how to maintain a 4x4 configuration; round things don't settle into square packing, but I guess the stacker could have fingers set to stack 4X1 in 4 wide configuration and get a wire-tie machine to do the 4X1 first and then bind the 4X4 between the fingers before retracting them. Even then it will be an unstable configuration. Hexagonal twist packing is stable and flexible for handling; I'll leave figuring out if that is usable to the OP.