Vibratory Feeder Vocabulary

At Hoosier Feeder Company, part feeders are our “bread and butter”, and we interact with these machines every day.  As the parts feeding industry has grown over time, so has the language that is used to communicate within it.  We try to communicate about a projects inner workings as clearly as possible but sometime, we confess, those conversations get a little “wordy”.  Here are some vocabulary words that may help shed a little light into your next vibratory feeder project. 

 

• Discharge – The “output” of a feeder bowl that presents correctly oriented parts
• Drive unit – Active part of a vibratory feeder to which the bowl is mounted; features electromagnetic coils to provide controlled vibration
• Concept – A sequential group of tooling features that select correctly oriented parts and remove incorrectly oriented parts
• Blade – Thin piece of tooling to confine a part’s movement by restricting movement of a specific feature of the part
• Cam – Tooling feature resembling a shark fin that contacts a particular feature of the part to rotate it in a controlled way
• Fill and grind – Method of building a feeder bowl that eliminates all small voids and cavities cause by joining and welding metals pieces together
• Tangent extension – Straight length of discharge section beyond the center of the bowl
• Basic (noun) – A vibrator bowl with no part-specific, orienting tooling features (Each finished vibratory feeder begins as a “basic”)
• Shingling –  Symptom of parts with “ramp” like features that allow adjacent parts to ride up on one another similar, to shingles on a house
• Fan section – Tooling feature that uses gravity to allow parts’ center of mass to rotate to a hanging orientation
• Return Pan – Feature on bottom of feeder bowl that re-circulates incorrectly oriented parts
• Bernoulli jet – An air jet that engages a flat surface to produce a vacuum effect to select parts oriented in a particular way
• Passivation – Chemical process that adds a micro-coating to metals to inhibit corrosion, commonly used in medical feeder applications
• Chord section – Section of tooling that is completely straight (commonly used for parts with shallow domed features)
• Scallops – Tooling feature that utilizes “fingers” of varying widths to engage inner diameters (used on parts with two different inner diameters)
• Pill blades – Tooling feature that uses 2 points of contact on opposite sides of the part to select vertically oriented parts over horizontal
• Profile – Tooling feature that utilizes the profile of the part to allow incorrectly oriented parts (wrong profile) to fall through a window to re-circulate
• Bubbling – Feature of some feeder bowls that allows for parts to “overflow” back into to the bowl, eliminating the need for the bowl to turn off and on to prevent parts jamming