Inside Dyson‘s automated-motor-manufacturing factory
In Dyson’s top secret motor manufacturing facility, robots have taken over. But fear not, these robots are of the making, rather than terminating persuasion. They work 24 hours a day, helping to make Dyson’s 50 million motors, performing tasks quicker and more precisely than any human hand could. Welcome to the future of motorised machines making machine motors.
On the fittingly named Pioneer Crescent in Singapore’s Jurong West district, an industrial building hides a space age secret.
At the end of a labyrinth of muggy corridors there is a secured door which, if you have the right security clearance, gives way to a gleaming, crisp white room which is mercifully air conditioned, but incredibly noisy.
This is the room where last year Dyson manufactured all 13 million of its digital motors. Over 400 machines are pneumatically and mechanically twisting, turning and inserting components as part of a manufacturing line. Despite all these moving parts it can make one motor every two seconds.
Rows of machines stand in line like a science museum exhibition encased in protective sheets of acrylic. Materials like copper wire or neodymium magnets are stacked on neat surgical trollies which are added to machine entry points by the few humans you can see. They are in surgical dress too, covered by protective lab coats and face masks to prevent contaminants from entering the process.
Motors come in all different shapes and sizes and power almost all of their machines.
The largest parts used in these motors just 70mm tall, while the smallest, the tiny sense magnet is just 3mm. And the V10 motor is their fastest and most powerful to date, thanks in no small way to the precise robotic machines that manufacture them.
For example, the impeller on the new motor is so precise that it has to be injection moulded with an accuracy of just +/-20 microns, which is just a quarter of the thickness of a human hair. Likewise, the delicate ceramic shaft, around which the whole motor spins, is so finely balanced that it can only be handled by robots gentle enough to grip it without it shattering.
Dyson make one digital motor every two seconds
“It is about repeatability and refusing to compromise on quality,” explains Matthew Childe, global head of motor development at Dyson. “Bringing to life a [production] line this complex is extremely challenging because even if you look at the motor as a sum of its parts, they don’t just arrive and get put into a machine which gives birth to a motor the following day. There’s a lot of planning and processes, working with the vendors, selecting materials that are robust, ensuring they are actually available, and then actually designing the machines that make the machines. It’s a huge job. Huge.”
And production is showing no signs of slowing. The ramp up to make the five million V10 motors Dyson are planning for 2018 is three times faster than they made 1.5 million V6 motors during its first year in 2013.
All of the five million V10 motors will be made in just two sites in the world, in Singapore and the Philippines. Twin production lines have been installed in each location which will make motor-assembly almost exclusively automated, using robots capable of repeating movements hundreds of times per minute, within a 2–3mm range of accuracy. Or, in other words, a feat that no human hand could.
These production lines are organised into a spiral pattern calculated to minimise the distance components have to travel between each station.
It is actually possible to watch a motor being assembled from beginning to end by walking along the galleys between the machines. The whole process takes just over four hours starting with little magnets being slotted onto the thin shaft, then the impeller being fitted, next the winding of copper coils, and finally attaching the circuit board.
All 36 work stations are monitored by the sci-fi sounding ‘Control Tower’, a complex Manufacturing Enterprise System (MES), which replaces the factory foreman of old and can slow down or speed up individual parts of the line in real-time to prevent build ups or bottlenecks.
As a result, the line is more efficient. Because it can also run 24 hours a day Dyson can now make over 75,000 motors every day.
This operation has escalated dramatically for the production of V10 vacuum cleaner. The automated production line currently operating in Singapore is just one of five planned for that facility. Another five are currently being built in the Philippines as well. However, with this increased scale and complexity, Dyson’s motor manufacturing operation isn’t without its fair share of challenges.
MAtt explains “we haven’t added automation for the sake of it. We wanted to put in more smartness and more traceability into our manufacturing operation. Ideally, one should track every single component coming in and going out from the factory, from the beginning to the end. This is true traceability. Each subcomponent arriving with a sub-serial number that is tracked all the way along the line until it emerges as a motor with its own serial number that corresponds to all the sub-components.
“This isn’t just about efficiency. It means we can specify the quality we get. On the quality control side of things we can give some parts a 100 percent tolerance for accuracy. We aren’t even looking at millimetres. If you look back at the tolerance in layman’s terms for the motor in our hairdryer, it has to be smaller than a strand of hair. We are talking about microns.
“This is the challenging aspect for the designers and engineers. Just because you can design and make the perfect part for 10 machines, it doesn’t mean it will still work when you try to make it a million. That’s what the manufacturing side [of Dyson] needed to control and what makes this such a special company to work for. When I saw the robots we wanted to make I signed on the dotted line right there and then. These days there aren’t a lot of companies willing to invest this kind of money in manufacturing.”
The figures would certainly seem to support Yvonne’s argument. A survey published in October 2017 by the manufacturing trade body, Engineering Employers’ Federation (EEF) found that investments in manufacturing machinery had fallen to just 6.5 percent of turnover.
Dyson is bucking this trend. The company recently announced that they would be spending an additional £200 million on research and development in 2018, taking their overall spend to over £8 million a week. Similarly, on the manufacturing side, while Dyson does not disclose exactly how much it costs to make each motor that comes off this line, simply by looking at the hundreds of millions of pounds of investment it has spent on the advanced robotic manufacturing line that makes them, it is clear that this is one of the most important technologies they have ever designed.
Read more about the Dyson V10 motor here.
