AM Flow
AM-Flows AM-SORT and AM-VISION products at Midwest Prototyping.
Midwest Prototyping has added automated sorting capabilities to its Blue Mounds production facility by installing the AM-VISION and AM-SORT products from AM-Flow.
The company is one of the first users of AM-Flow’s vision technology and has deployed the two modules to enable the automation of part recognition, sorting and routing. It will support Midwest Prototyping’s daily volume of Selective Laser Sintering, Multi Jet Fusion and Stereolithography prints.
Allowing Midwest Prototyping to become fully paperless, AM-VISION and AM-SORT are designed to help companies increase production volumes by automating typically labour intensive steps. AM-VISION, per Am-Flow, can help one operator process 6x the normal manual volume, enabling multiple sorting runs per day by processing batches of 400 parts in under 30 minutes. AM-SORT, meanwhile, is a custom conveyor system that can sort 3,600 items per hour, while promising to handle 3D printed parts carefully.
“The bottlenecks in the industry right now are largely in the post-processing side, so everything after the printer. We understood this some time ago and have been working aggressively to solve it as we continue our mission to reinvent the service bureau,” commented Steve Grundahl, President at Midwest Prototyping. “Our interest in AM-Flow goes back several years now, as we were one of the earliest adopters of their solutions. We remain very impressed with the AM-Flow technology and are excited to upgrade our facility with their latest offering. While we continue to grow, we just can’t continue to add human labour to simply sort parts.”
“Midwest Prototyping is one of those visionary companies that saw the need for workflow automation at a very early stage,” added AM-Flow CEO Stefan Rink. “Both to address efficiency, as well as to provide a better customer experience, opening up new demanding markets where process control is important for certification.”
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