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Festo AG & Co KG
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Metal-cutting machines weighing tonnes stand on an area covering
14,000 square metres on the ground floor of the Technology Plant.
The highly automated facilities work around the clock and produce
the basic elements for the Festo products in the shortest of time:
valve housings, valve assemblies, valve cartridges and individual
handling technology components for linear units and rotational
drives. The components are highly precise, custom-fit and of the
best surface quality The processing route from the warehouse for
the delivered metal bars through to the surface finish in the elec-
troplating department runs over just 120 metres in the case of
many components
Classic mechanical engineering
The ring-shaped cartridges are the centrepieces of the valves, as
they provide the seal Valve assemblies form the base on which the
valves are screwed The parts for valve housings and handling
technology, due to their complexity, are subject to the highest
demands in terms of geometric tolerances The individual process
steps for manufacturing the valve housings – such as sawing,
machining, deburring (removing edges) and washing – are done on
interlinked facilities using robots Depending on the task, the spe-
cialists implement different levels of automation in this respect
Well rounded
The manufacture of components for valve housings used to be a
time-consuming process with individual distributed steps A new
large installation in the Technology Plant, a so-called rotary trans-
fer machine, reproduces this process automatically on an area of
140 square metres The delivered metal bars are sawn into pieces
and deposited on a rotating table by a robot, where the individual
pieces are machined With the aid of various tools, 14 stations
arranged in a circle are completed in cycles lasting just seconds
Afterwards the valve housings are deburred and washed in a high
pressure washing facility so that they are ready for assembly
Perfect in form
Turning, milling, drilling and grinding – in the machining
department, precision components made of metal
are manufactured for further processing in the assembly
process
Numbers in the machining department
• Several million valve cartridges per year
• Tens of thousands of valve housings a day
• Thousands of individual components for handling products
• 8,000 machining tools