Living in 3-D

The frameless Viking Air Manufacturing building, located in Sydney, B.C., was fabricated by Behlen Industries. Completed in 2009, it is 52,070 sq. ft. It features a massive hangar, as well as storage space for up to $5 million in spare airplane parts. Images courtesy of Behlen.

Behlen Industries LP is the largest manufacturer of steel building systems in Canada. The Brandon, Man.-based business builds both rigid frame and frameless buildings, the latter of which it ships to customers around the world. For a company with a broad reach and a large production facility to manage, modernizing operations has been critical in the past few years to match both the needs of today and those of the future. The company has been very busy upgrading not just machinery on the shop floor, but also the technology they require to manage the flow of the work that goes through the facility.

Behlen Vice President of Engineering and Innovation Pat Versavel has been given the task of determining what CNC equipment and software updates the company could use to make it more efficient. The approach his team has taken has been a mix of money-smart upgrades on existing machinery and innovative process changes made possible by investments in both equipment and software. In a shop that survives on low-volume, high-variability parts, making the right investments can have a large impact on product part flow. Behlen has had to be creative to make it work.

Cutting Automation: The First Step

One of the first investments Behlen made on its innovation journey was a Voortman V808 robotic thermal cutting machine with 8-axis capabilities. The machine makes it possible for the operator to cut any 3-D shape possible and mark all four sides of a structural steel beam. The machine has an automatic loading system and a positioning speed of 42 m/min. (137 ft./min.). The working width inside it is 1,250 mm (49 in.) and the height is 500 mm (20 in.).

“We took an old 3-axis drilling machine out,” said Versavel. “We were getting a lot of our steel precut and would bring it in to do the drilling, but that wasn’t working well. With the V808, we can scribe, cut holes as we require, and do all the coping. It has made a big difference in how we handle steel. We bring in more full lengths, which means we can stock steel rather than bringing it in at the eleventh hour to get it processed. We have saved a lot of labour out on the floor. Using the scribing function has really helped us with fit-up time, so overall it has had a very positive impact on the plant.”

Press Brakes Rebuilt

Some things aren’t as easy to remove from a shop floor as a 3-axis drilling machine. For instance, Behlen has three 40-year-old, 600-ton press brakes, each 26 ft. long. Two of them are dedicated to working with forming dies and specialized applications such as grain bins and parts for the company’s frameless buildings. The third brake operates as a regular bending tool.

Rather than go through the expense of removing these gigantic machines, Versavel’s team had them stripped down and replaced the hydraulics and the controls.

“The original supplier still makes the same types of press brake the same way, so they came in and completely updated them,” said Versavel. “The repeatability on these machines is now 0.001 in., with an accuracy within 0.004 in. And as with many new controls, these simplify the setup for the operator. All the programming for parts can be done in the office, and those programs can be sent to the shop floor. The operation of the press brake is no longer the art form it once was.”

3-D Modelling

The exterior of the Viking Air building.

Being able to send code to the shop floor to simplify part flow is a key goal for Versavel. Ultimately, it just makes sense with the computing available today that you should be able to look at a 3-D rendering of a building and be able to take each 3-D segment of it and work backwards from there to break out the necessary parts to build. However, that ideal hasn’t yet been reached, so Behlen is helping to make it happen.

“About three years ago we started going down the path of doing everything in a 3-D environment,” Versavel explained. “But there is no out-of-the-box program for our type of industry where we are working with three-plate welded beams that we custom taper in a variety of shapes. So we did a lot of searching to find a software program we could at least start working from. We settled on Advance Steel, which is now owned by Autodesk. We had it customized, which took two years from the time we started to the end result, the product we really wanted. However, now we have CNC code and models that are available for all the parts that we produce. Before, for instance, we may have had the specifications for each part we ran through the V808, but we had to program it all by hand. Now we can simply run the code into the machine.”

Robotic Welding

Having 3-D models available for every single assembly the shop produces also makes it easier to introduce a welding cell, which Behlen has also done. The company now can build a simulation using a scale model of the cell and the part. Once the simulation is perfected, that code is driven back to the robot for execution.

“Five years ago the technology that allows us to do that didn’t exist,” said Versavel. The software Behlen uses for the simulation, called Octopuz, was created by In-House Solutions.

“The simulator also compensates for misalignment when the program goes to the robot,” said Versavel. “The system goes along the line of where the weld will go to check exactly where it is and adjusts itself as necessary.”

The robotic welding cell was developed with Quebec’s AGT Robotics, what the company calls its BeamMaster Weld cell. It includes a trunnion system that allows 360-degree access to the part.

“We can only weld in the flat, so we needed the part to be able to rotate to allow that,” Versavel explained. “We ended up working with an Australian company called Rimco for the fixtures. The challenge with a lot of trunnion-style fixtures is that the part has to be the same size at either end, whereas our assemblies are often tapered. We do a lot of three-plate welded beams. We actually cut our own webs and flanges and weld them together in an I-type shape, but that shape can be whatever specification we want. This trunnion has devices that allow the system to accommodate our needs with these custom shapes.”

In the welding cell the trunnion is rotated automatically as required by the setup. Most of Behlen’s material is 30 ft. or less; the cell is capable of handling two 30-ft. pieces at once, or one part that is 58 ft. long.

“We have done a lot to decrease weight in the buildings we construct,” said Versavel. “Now, there’s a lot of incentive to drive labour costs out of the process. Putting the robotic welding cell in was a big driver because welders would have to rotate parts, reposition them, and then weld. This involved the use of a crane to move the part into position several times, which is time-consuming. Also, people get tired. A welder can run a bead, but can a welder run a 60-in. bead without stopping at all for a break? We do have an aging workforce. Robots never get tired. Our incentive is to be able to weld any tapered shape, and we can do that using this system.”

The robotic welding cell was developed with Quebec’s AGT Robotics, what the company calls its BeamMaster Weld cell. It includes a trunnion system that allows 360-degree access to the part.

In the process Behlen hasn’t lost employees. If anything, they’ve gained from the greater productivity. The shop has also installed manually rotating trunnions from the same company for other welding cells that can benefit from such a setup.

Next Steps

The automation and controls upgrades Behlen has done have helped the company drive more work through its facility, allowing it to keep employees very busy. Currently 140 people are working on the shop floor and 70 people are in the office.

In the process, Behlen has also helped the suppliers of these systems add more sophistication to their products. Every one of the software systems that the company has adopted required extra work to make it function correctly in its operations. And there is still some way to go.

“One of the downsides of robotic welding is that it can take as long to program a part as it does to weld it,” said Versavel. “So we aim for a minimum quantity of three parts for any robotic welding we do. If you don’t have multiples, it starts to affect payback benefits. But we’ve got a project in the works where we are looking to take one-hour programming times and cut that down to 10 minutes. And we are getting closer to making that a reality. Ultimately, we want to get to where a one-off part run on the welding cell makes sense.”

Although Behlen specializes in steel buildings, as a division of WGI it also sometimes supports the work of other divisions in the company. The more efficient it can make its operations, the better it can serve all the larger organization’s needs.

Versavel feels there is still much to be done to improve the efficiency of Behlen’s shop floor. For instance, he is looking at improving communications from the office to some older equipment on the floor, and ultimately he is aiming to make the shop completely paperless. Regardless, it is clear that innovation will remain a keystone in the company’s operations, and each process on the shop floor will be revisited regularly to see how it can be improved upon.

Editor Robert Colman can be reached at rcolman@canadianfabweld.com.

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