Annual Report
OF MANKIND, MACHINES, AND MATERIALS
A partnership network of experts at MAN, HELLER, and SICK perfects the deTec safety light curtain.
Polycarbonate is a proven material in the machine tools segment. SICK’s deTec4 Core safety light curtains are correspondingly equipped with polycarbonate front screens as standard. When, in 2016, MAN Truck & Bus commissioned a complete machine park with 14 HELLER CNC machining centers for milling and drilling work, there was no reason not to use the proven material. In response to a request from MAN, HELLER had equipped the machining centers, which they had specially designed for MAN, with deTec4 Core safety light curtains from SICK to safeguard the machine doors. Everything went well at first. After a few months, however, the light curtains suffered more and more failures because their polycarbonate front screens were broken near the end caps at the bottom, resulting in machine downtime.
During the fault analysis, coolants and lubricants were at the top of the list of suspected causes because their chemical compositions often change and there are no labeling requirements. The suspicions were confirmed when experts at SICK’s Repair Center examined the returned devices and carried out tests in the plastics laboratory with samples of the coolants, lubricants, and detergents used by MAN. The specialists from MAN, HELLER, and SICK all agreed that the only reliable solution to this problem had to be in a form that was independent of whatever composition was used. This meant thinking beyond the hitherto successful use of the plastic polycarbonate.