Automated Equipment - Industrial Agriculture
Equipment Design - Automated Twine Puller - Industrial Agriculture
The industry of high speed forage processing and packaging has continuously evolved with innovative approaches to removing humans from manual activities and replacing them with automated equipment. One of the remaining activities to attend to was the removal of twine from the bale before it enters the processing equipment. Although this task sounds simple, it is inherently very challenging. How do you locate, grab and remove twines without missing or breaking any of them when you don’t know if you will find a single or as many as 20 at a time. What works for a single tends to allow them to slip free when you grab multiples. What works for multiples at a time tends to allow singles to slip free. The business case for an automated machine to do this job is voided if the machine breaks twines or misses them as it then requires a human to retrieve it. In order for the business case to work it must be capable of running without human correction for hours on end.
Often in design projects people tend to jump to producing ideas they believe will solve the problem and then evaluating it for its positive and negative attributes. This approach is akin to the guess and test approach which essentially is, be creative and brainstorm as many ideas as you can and then proof test them through discussion and evaluation. Although this method is likely the most common, it doesn't tend to be progressive and often feels like “throwing ideas in the air and then shooting them down”.
A different approach was found to be much more effective. Before brainstorming designs, the core required functions were determined. Then effective mechanisms which produce each function were identified.
Instead of choosing the best design, what if you design from the perspective of function stacking to progressively increase likelihood of functional success? How does that look?
What if you identify several ways that have reasonable likelihood of functional success either for a single twine or multiples and then the design problem becomes, find ways to stack them together into one design in such a way as to not compromise any of the other mechanisms?
The result we produced by focusing on functional mechanisms and stacking several together was a tool with outstanding functional performance across all input variables. It was patented and became the most profitable device in the company's history.
