Reducing Waste, Time and Fatigue with Automated Dispense

These processes are time consuming and lead to operator fatigue. The epoxies themselves are only usable for 30 minutes before having to be replaced, and the delicate balance between too little epoxy used and too much leads to costly cleanup and rework.

As such, L3Harris Technologies' production lines in Londonderry, New Hampshire, have incorporated new technology from Nordson EFD for automated dispense processes since 2020, according to Lou Veiga, L3Harris Manufacturing Engineering lead.

Virtually all of the production lines in the Integrated Vision Solutions production facility have some level of dispense as a process step, Veiga said, and the facility has now incorporated five EFD dispense systems within the product lines in the last two years.

We started with applications that incurred a lot of operator fallout due the difficulty of the manual processes, which leads to more scrap and rework, Veiga said. We first targeted lines with larger volumes that could justify the cost of the system, and we're now trying to get as much utilization out of the machine as we can, because it has been so successful in terms of repeatability of dispense.

In fact, the lines have reduced application time by an average of 65 percent while almost completely eliminating the cleanup time for the processes by implementing the Nordson EFD system.

LINK:	https://www.l3harris.com/newsroom/editorial/2022/10/reducing-waste-tim...
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