AUTOMATION AND OPTIMIZATION OF GLASS MANUFACTURING LINE Taner İncirci 1 and Dilek (Bilgin) Tükel 2 1 Altınay Robot Technologies, İstanbul Deri ve Endüstri Serbest Bölgesi, Orjin Cad. 34957 Tuzla Istanbul, Turkey, taner.incirci@ altinay.com.tr 2 Control Engineering Department, Doğuş University, Acıbadem,Kadıköy 34722 İstanbul, Turkey, dtukel@ dogus.edu.tr Abstract – The motivation of this study is designing and developing a production line for solar and patterned glass manufacturing. In the glass industry, automation is a widely used and well accepted technology in each step of the production. An optimization algorithm is designed and developed based on big bang-big crunch methodology that solves robotized glass cutting problem. Index terms – Cutting Industrial Automation, Industrial Robot, Optimization, Quality Control. 1. INTRODUCTION Glass has been naturally formed when rocks rich in silicates melt at high temperatures and cool before they can form crystalline structures for thousands of years and has been manufactured for human use since 12,000 BCE [1]. Early examples of glass were glass beads, jars, and eating materials first appeared in ancient Egyptian culture. This most versatile and wonderful substances on Earth, used in many applications and in a wide variety of forms, from plain clear glass to tempered and tinted varieties. Turkey is among the top glass manufacturers of the world. The Turkish glass industry has a share of 8 percent in total global production. Building glass production in 2006 was around 1 million tons, 85 percent of which belongs to flat glass products. In 2009, Şişecam Co Mersin decided to establish a new production line for patterned and solar glass. Altınay Robot Technologies Inc, which is specialized [2], [3] in mechatronic projects, automation technology, robotic handling systems for automotive and glass industry, has designed and built cold end equipment for the production of patterned and solar glass for Şişecam Co in Mersin, Turkey. In this application oriented paper, the production planning and cutting optimization design concepts for the patterned and solar glass manufacturing line will be presented. The designed fully automated line from the lehr to the warehouse consists of several connected sections (Fig. 1): • Conveying the glass ribbon; • Quality control of the glass ribbon manual or automatic system; • X and Y cutting the glass ribbon according to the production plan into the sheets of optimum size while minimizing the waste using the optimization software “Optimay”; • Snapping; • Size and position control using vision; • Rejection of faulty glass sheets; • Sorting using robots (with conveyor tracking ability) according to size and quality; • Papering, dusting or stringing the glass sheets. Controls of the designed line from lehr to warehouse are achieved using PC, PLC and Motion Controllers. The control system meets quick reaction and full use of the line capacity requirements at its best. Using a vision system, robots are capable of taking off glass plates directly from the moving transport conveyor, correcting their alignment. The Optimay is designed for solving cutting optimization problems for glass ribbon lines. This Fig. 1 Patterned and solar glass cutting line.