Rail sleepers production automation

What are rail sleepers?

Rail sleepers are one of the important accessories of the railway track system. Although it is not amazing in appearance, its function cannot be underestimated. The rail sleeper must not only support the rail track, but also maintain the position of the railway rail, and also transmit the huge pressure transmitted by the rail to the ballast bed, which must have certain flexibility and elasticity. The production of rail sleepers is generally divided into several main types, such as wooden sleepers, steel rail sleepers, cement sleepers, and synthetic material sleepers. At present, cement rail sleepers are still in the mainstream among many types of sleepers.

rail sleeper

In the manufacturing process of cement rail sleepers, due to technological requirements, after the cement sleeper is formed and demolded, it is necessary to carry out strict air blowing, oil injection, capping, and other operations on the oil injection hole of the sleeper to ensure the quality of the finished sleeper off-line. However, in the past, the air blowing, oil filling, and capping of the sleeper were all done manually.

As a single cement sleeper weighs 225 kg, and the oil filling tool is also very heavy, the manual operation is not only labor-intensive but also repetitive and simple. Therefore, sleeper manufacturers are faced with problems such as difficulty in recruiting, high labor costs, and high personnel turnover.
The sleeper manufacturing industry urgently needs to introduce robots for intelligent production line construction, reduce the burden of employees engaged in such heavy labor, reduce labor management costs, improve product quality and production efficiency, and maintain corporate competitiveness in an increasingly fierce market.

At present, Chinese enterprises produce industrial robots with a load of 20kg, an arm span of 1813mm, repeatability of ±0.05mm, and the ability to carry heavy oiling tools for long-term operations.

railway sleeper

After the sleeper manufacturing enterprise introduced industrial robots to complete the replacement of robots in the rail sleepers’ oil filling and capping process, the problems of difficult recruitment, expensive labor, and low work efficiency were solved.

After the railway sleeper is loaded through the conveyor belt, the high-precision industrial robot, with intelligent visual recognition of the position of the casing on the sleeper rail groove, sprays high-pressure air to blow out the concrete residue and other dirt in the casing, and then accurately locates the railway sleeper oil hole and fills it. The special grease for high-speed rail, and finally automatically installing the dust cover, truly realize the integrated automatic operation of railway sleeper blowing, oil filling, and capping.