Güdel & Georg – Transformer core stacking

4 Aug 2020

For some years now, Güdel has been involved in the development of systems for automated stacking of transformer cores. And, in 2017, Güdel concluded a cooperation agreement with Heinrich Georg Maschinenfabrik in Germany, the market leader in the field of production plants for the transformer industry.

The core of a power transformer in the 50- to 350-metric tons range consists of several thousand layers of stratified sheets, each around
0.25 mm thick, which must be stacked with maximum precision.

Currently, this process is largely carried out by hand, with up to eight people simultaneously stacking sheets up to 6 m long and 1 m wide, which is very time-consuming for each core.

For some months now, Güdel and Georg have been comissioning the first «AutoStack1000». This is an offline system which stacks the pre-cut sheets to form a core.

The system achieves precision of up to 0.5 mm in positioning, and stacked sets of up to 12 sheets in hundreds. Extrapolated to an average core weighing 120 metric tons and with 4,000 layers, this results in an automatic laying time of just over 100 h, representing a 75% improvement over today's manual process of 400 h.

To get more insights about the core stacking technology, have a look to the following article from Transformers Magazine.