RE: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Sorting Steel Balls

You could also shine a shadow of the ball on a linear photodiode or camera
array. The number of cells blocked at the largest point would be a measure
of the diameter. The advantage of this method is that the computer that does
the analysis can be programmed to group the balls if that's what you'd
desire.


|The most obvious method is a tilted track with graded holes in it, the
|smaller ones first. You could have a mechanism that holds a track with
|20 holes in it, and tubes below that go to 20 different bins. The
|balls that are
|too large for any hole wind up in a reject bin, where all balls
|are larger than
|any hole in your track. You then run these through again after switching
|to the next larger track. It will take a little fooling around to
|find the right
|slope, spacing of holes, etc. One thing that comes to mind is to have
|wire rails that don't allow the balls to drop into the holes
|unless they are
|very close to being able to fit through the holes. You might need
|a 'wiper'
|to bump the balls out of the holes that they almost can fit through. A
|wheel with spokes, kind of like a water wheel could be used to control
|the flow of balls into the sorter.
|
|Another method could use bars made of hardened and ground shaft, with
|the balls rolling down an incline, and the shafts slightly farther apart at
|the downstream end. You might be able to sort a fairly large range of ball
|sizes with a few feet of this. Maybe a 1" square funnel leading
|to a container
|for each size, and the rails spreading apart at the rate of .001" per inch.
|I see you want 281 different sizes. That would be 23 feet long to do it all
|in one pass. But, it would only be 6 feet long to do in 4 passes.
|
|A commercial method I've heard of used a resilient board of some sort, and
|the balls were dropped from a calibrated height. They bounced to
|a different
|height depending on size, and fell into troughs based on size. I
|think this was
|in a line where balls were all within a few thousandths of the same size.
|
|I can't see how a PLC or PC would do anything but increase cost (VASTLY)
|and slow the process down.
|
|Jon
|
|
|
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