Welding: Ultrasonic Welders for Critical Small Plastic Part Assembly

A new generation of ultrasonic welders designed to meet the growing demand for the assembly of miniaturized plastic components with embedded electronics, intricate designs and thinner plastic walls—increasingly evident across the medical, electronics, and automotive industries--is newly available from Emerson, Danbury, Conn. The Branson GSX Ultrasonic Welding Platform is an advanced and intuitive flexible joining solution reportedly designed to optimize and ensure quality welds, while helping manufacturers meet project timelines and deliver expected return on investments.

Key to the GSX is Emerson’s advanced Electro-Mechanical Advanced Actuation System, which is said to deliver unprecedented control and position accuracy and result in faster, high-performance welding of very fragile and intricate components. The highly configurable GSX welding platform can accommodate many different parts and application types by using an array of welding parameters and actuation modes during a single weld, which is said to ensure quality welds leading to fewer rejects. Using a multicore processor and a linear encoder drive, this multi-tier actuation system can be instantaneously adjusted based on real-time feedback. This is said to result in the same level of precision and repeatability across multiple welders.

The modular GSX Platform forms the basis for a wide range of models to be launched over the next two years, each designed to suit the needs of specific customer applications. The platform can be configured for all customer environments, ranging from standalone benchtop systems to semi- and fully-automated manufacturing lines. By offering easy integration into a digital environment and standardized transfer of relevant data, the GSX Platform is Industry 4.0/IIoT-enabled, providing access to actionable performance and diagnostic data, supporting production efficiency, traceability and maintenance improvements. The GSX features simple and intuitive software, supported by 4” and 12” touchscreen HMIs, which enable operators to perform faster, correct set-ups and reduce application testing time. Faster start-up of up to 60% in most cases, with an assurance of weld quality and increased production efficiency is claimed. Moreover, a GSX stack and tooling reportedly can be replaced in less than five minutes compared to conventional ultrasonic welders which can take over 1 hour.