• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.70-77
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• 2020

Vibratory bowl feeders are widely utilized to align and feed the parts stacked inside the bowl of a feeder. The electro-magnetic force of the electromagnet in a bowl feeder generates the excitation force for the bowl to vibrate in both the horizontal and vertical directions to continuously feed the parts on the track. The feed rate of the part depends on the associated displacement in each direction during the vibration. Therefore, the excitation force induced by the electromagnet should be estimated in advance to ensure the suitable design of the bowl feeder. In this study, a theoretical solution was developed to calculate the electro-magnetic force of the electromagnet for a bowl feeder. Using the proposed solution, the electro-magnetic forces corresponding to a variation in the input parameters of the electromagnet, such as the voltage, frequency, and air gap, could be obtained. The force values obtained using the theoretical solution exhibited a satisfactory agreement with the results obtained using the finite element method, thereby demonstrating the validity of the approach. Subsequently, the bowl displacements were analyzed using the motion equation for the bowl feeder when the theoretically obtained excitation force were applied to vibrate the feeder. The correlation between the vertical displacements of the bowl and input parameters of the electromagnet could be obtained.