The Arthur G. Russell Company has
built hundreds of machines for the assembly of medical
products such as syringes and blood collection tubes.
One of the most critical aspects of syringe assembly
is the handling of sharp needles. Needles are produced
in many different sizes and must be handled with absolutely
no damage to the sharp point.
The device you see operating
here is one station of a large in-line syringe assembly
machine. Needles and plastic parts are fed, assembled,
glued and inspected with vision systems on a typical
assembly machine. It is standard for us to completely
assemble and inspect 800 or
more parts per minute of a typical needle product. On
the station below, needles
are loaded into a hopper and transferred by vacuum to
the wheel shown on the right.
At the bottom of the wheel, needles
are transferred to a belt to be presented to a vacuum
pickup head. This servo driven assembly provides extremely
accurate and high-speed handling of needles. Once the
needles have been picked up, they are rotated 90 degrees
and inserted into the plastic hubs of the syringes. After
they leave this station, glue is applied to each hub-needle
assembly and the glue is cured using ultraviolet light.
Vision inspections follow along with the addition of
other parts of the product, followed by final vision
inspection and offloading.
We have extensive experience
in high-speed assembly of all types of medical products
as well as a thorough understanding of FDA requirements
for medical product assembly.
