Method and plant for managing the production cycle of a plant in a process for building tyres for vehicle wheels
AssigneePirelli Tyre S.p.A.
InventorsMaurizio Marchini, Albert Berenguer
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A method and a plant for managing the production cycle of a plant for building tyres for vehicle wheels, wherein the plant provides for a storage region for anchoring annular structures and a plurality of processing stations at least one of which is associated with a forming drum, includes feeding a plurality of anchoring annular structures to the storage region, picking up the anchoring annular structures from the storage region at a predetermined picking-up position that does not change on changing of the types of the anchoring annular structures, and feeding the picked-up anchoring annular structures to the processing station associated with the forming drum.
Claims14
A transfer apparatus for feeding anchoring annular structures to a forming drum associated with a processing station for building a tyre for vehicle wheels comprising:
- a basket designed to house a plurality of anchoring annular structures, said basket comprises support members provided for supporting said anchoring annular structures, each supporting member includes an abutment wall comprising a pair of coplanar fins separated from one another by a recess,
- wherein each anchoring annular structure is supported by a respective supporting member at a respective support portion that is defined by a single circular sector at an upper portion of the anchoring annular structure's internal circumference,
- wherein an uppermost support portion of each anchoring annular structure spans a corresponding recess of its respective supporting member, and wherein the basket comprises:
- a first advancing member, which comprises two pulleys and acts on said support members, designed to move each support member along a first path between an initial position and a predetermined picking-up position in three dimensional space, and along a second path between the predetermined picking-up position and the initial position;
- a picking up device comprising a gripper for picking up a first anchoring annular structure of the plurality of anchoring annular structures from its uppermost support portion by inserting the gripper into the first anchoring annular structure's corresponding recess of its respective supporting member when the first anchoring annular structure reaches the predetermined picking-up position, wherein said picking up device is movable between said predetermined picking-up position and at least one release position for releasing the first anchoring annular structure to said processing station, and said predetermined picking-up position does not change if anchoring annular structures of the plurality of anchoring annular structures have differing diameters.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.