By: David Mandeville, Director of Marketing,
Sealant Equipment & Engineering, Inc.

Background: The appliance industry bonds glass directly to oven door panels.

Their adhesive choices are either very high bond double-sided adhesive tape or a liquid adhesive such as 2-component silicone or methacrylate polymer for high bond strength, long term adhesion and high temperature resistance.

Situation: A major appliance manufacturer was using very high bond double-sided adhesive tape to bond glass to metal oven doors.

To ensure correct placement, slotted templates was used for workers to locate up to 15 pieces of tape on the door.

The workers wore protective gloves and arm socks and then manually cut tape to perform their task.

Performance and quality issues included: tape sticks to the gloves, extended time to position tape, some tape is placed in the wrong location, quality control and repair is higher than desired and the inability to increase production rate is limited to manpower.

6-axis robot dispenses 2-component
adhesive onto an appliance door in a
simple manual load-unload fixture.

Study: After a performance study it was determined that a better process was needed to replace the tape and placement of adhesive to ensure product quality of the appliance and ability to meet increasing production demands.

The appliance engineers worked with adhesive and process equipment suppliers to determine the right adhesive and best equipment to optimize cost, production rate and product quality.

Programming the 6-axis robot for dispensing
2 beads of adhesive onto a door panel

2-station and 6-station robot dispensing systems are created for manual load and unload of appliance components.

Each system is operated by one small 6-axis robot and is manufactured and integrated by Sealant Equipment with their Servo-Flo 505 meter-mix dispense system.

Production rates, cost and quality now meet customer requirements.