Modeling and Analysis of a Vibratory Bowl Feeder

Abstract

Vibratory bowl feeders are required in industrial automation for the correct orientation of feed parts. These are considered to be efficient machines that are cheap and effective. The biggest disadvantage of the traditional vibratory bowl feeder is its inability to adapt to new designs, shapes, and orientations of the feed parts. Traditional vibratory bowl feeders are very inflexible and can work with only one orientation of the part. Although vibratory bowl feeders are considered to be traditional devices, these are now very much modernized and have adapted to diversified industrial needs. Robotic arms are also often used along with the cameras to orient the parts. However, with the employment of robots comes a high cost, extensive maintenance requirements, and complexity in the assembly line. So a viable solution is to use the best features of both machines, i.e. while keeping the cheap effective, and efficient qualities of a traditional vibratory bowl feeder, alter it to adapt to the changing part shapes and assembly lines. By doing so we can use the same vibratory bowl feeder for various orientations of components and in various assembly lines. This would eliminate the need for redesigning the vibratory bowl feeder with the orientation of each component, with which the assembly line is not only expensive but also time-consuming. By using this technique, we can orient almost any part, which is being fed to the feeder with the traditional vibratory feeder, without the use of fancy equipment or robots, just by altering and modernizing the traditional vibratory feeder. This would make the traditional vibratory bowl feeder, a device that is very flexible and can adapt to the changing feed, solving many problems. We can thus alter an already available system, to become versatile and adaptable, in numerous assembly lines for different parts, with very little alteration to the already existing systems. This research analyses the response of a vibratory bowl feeder under no external force, step input, and a sinusoidal input. The vibratory bowl feeder is modeled as a simple two degrees of freedom spring-mass-damper system and observed under the given inputs. The system is modeled as a case of base excitation, which is the case of a vibratory bowl feeder, as the input is applied to the system by the base. The results are validated by response graphs, which show the behavior and motion of the system under a specific input. Optimization suggestions are given by analyzing the results and behavior of the system.