Medical manufacturing is outpacing almost every other industry in its complexity

The landscape of the modern medical manufacturing facility is changing at a pace never seen before. Maintaining a modern, forward-facing factory while navigating and implementing new, evolving technologies such as collaborative robotics, servo-controlled end-of-arm tools, and high-speed pick and place systems, are just some of the challenges facing all modern manufacturers.

Thrown into the mix, new materials and ever-evolving standards and practices can make maintaining your production edge a full-time challenge.

Understanding what components to use in which situation can be confusing if you’re starting from scratch or just trying to solve a complex problem in your manufacturing process.

SCHUNK offers many components addressing the flexibility and longevity your processes demand to keep your lines running well into the next generation of production.

Where to start?

Cleanroom or cleanability? Understanding the difference between how clean a component must be and how you clean a component seems very close to the same but can drastically change the components you may choose in your automated systems.

Cleanroom classification refers to how much material is ejected or dropped from the component, such as grease, dust, lint, or particulate of any kind. ISO has a standard and rating system for measuring the cleanliness of any component. SCHUNK has cleanroom classification listed for all products in our documentation.

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Cleanability refers to how easily or readily a component can be cleaned to your standard and centers around features of the component that could hold or catch bio-matter and compromise an entire production cell or process. There’s no standard for cleanability, such as ISO, but the industry has adopted some proven design methodology.

Material composition

Another consideration is the composition of any component in your critical process path. Along with the cleanroom/cleanliness question you need to ask if any part of your process will subject critical components to any sensitive, caustic, aggressive cleaning solutions, or media inherent to your process.

In some SCHUNK grippers we can provide boots or covers of varying materials and design to withstand cleaning solutions or direct heavy spray allowing grippers to function under those unique conditions.

Specialized components

Finally, you should look to adapt any specialized systems or components that meet or exceed your current production requirements to allow for growth and flexibility of your very valuable production life cycle.

Some examples are cost effective servo-electric grippers, allowing for the greatest range of grip versus traditional pneumatic systems, while allowing for precise control of force and position to maximize throughput.

Another example is high- precision, high-speed pick-and-place units offering the most efficient and effective movement of an end effector at significant savings in cost and size over a traditional individual component design. To highlight this, the SCHUNK high-speed pick-and-place systems can reliably and accurately move up to 120 components per minute using precision linear motors in a compact, single unit design.

The world of medical manufacturing is outpacing almost every other industry in terms of the complexity, reliability, precision, and quality required to manufacture components that affect the lives of us all.

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SCHUNK: https://schunk.com