• Centricity Corporation

New Patented Technology for Feeding, Escaping, and Conveying of parts

In today's technical world, many automatic and semi-automatic processes require some degree of parts feeding and escapement.  Machinery builders and system integrators agree that parts handling is often times the most difficult and frustrating element of the manufacturing process. And, through the years, necessity has driven engineers and designers to develop a wide variety of ingenious devices to overcome the difficulties associated with parts feeding and escapement.
Parts have typically been fed through tubes, chutes, rails, tracks, guides, propelled by belts, air jets gravity, vibratory excitation, brushes, and the like. At the end point of feeding, external escapement devices are incorporated to provide for a controlled number of parts to exit on command.
Although techniques for feed parts vary widely, most have one common characteristic---they rely on contact with the outside surface of the part. Often times, a geometric feature such as a notch or flat is used for guidance or orientation, or both. Parts are fed and escaped with tooling in contact with this external feature.
However, when parts are contained on their outer surface, the tooling necessary for guidance is "female" in nature, a square tube or T-slot for instance. This female tooling must be crafted to conform to the outside dimensions of the part, and is often difficult to manufacture, sensitive to part variations and inflexible. Pathways other than straight runs are impractical due to cost considerations and manufacturing constraints.
With the introduction of Feedscape, a unique and powerful method of handling parts is now available. Fundamentally, Feedscape is a departure from the traditional method of handling parts from the outside, to handling parts from the inside. By utilizing patent pending technology, Feedscape takes advantage of the inside features of the parts. This seemingly simple change in the approach results in significant design possibilities. And, no longer is tooling female, but rather can now be male, permitting a number of advantages never before possible.
With Feedscape:
All external surfaces of the part are exposed and therefore available for additional operations such as inspection, gauging, plating, powder coating and others.
Tooling is less expensive to manufacture and significantly more flexible than its "straight line" predecessor.
Standard tooling can be used for a family of parts requiring only a similar internal feature.
Part jams are dramatically reduced and simpler to clear than with female tooling.
Part-to-part variation has little or no effect on performance.
In essence, the imagination of the designer is no longer limited to handling parts the traditional way.