Staking
Sun is a Tier 1 supplier to the Automotive Industry and a first mover in the Lithium-Ion battery market for; engineering design, metal stamping, molding and assembly. We work hard to ensure we meet the quality standards on all of our programs. To meet our goal of zero defects we create in process quality devices to ensure our processes are always in control and producing components that meet the exacting standards our customers depend on.
Sun manufactures a Lithium-Ion Battery pack Interconnect Board for a Tier 1 customer. All tooling and automation for this program was designed in house. This product really benefits from Sun being a "one-stop shop" as it consists of components manufactured in our Metal Stamping and Plastic Molding departments and then the product is assembled. This part is comprised of 28 components all manufactured in house.
Our Engineering team designed an automated staking machine to assemble this product. The main function of this automated assembly machine is to rivet the flexible print circuit to the interconnect board that we fabricated in house. This component is assembled by rivets, there are 17 rivets per interconnect board. The rivets are loaded into the fixture; the fixture is then loaded to interconnect board and then loaded to the machine. The rivets are staked individually with a precise servo powered press head and positioned with a servo controlled X-Y table. As the machine stakes the rivet the force curve is closely monitored, if the force is outside of the acceptable window on the curve or if the rivet is missing or out of position, it will shut down the process insuring all rivet connections meet the critical quality standard required.
