In today's era of accelerated construction industrialization, steel bar processing, as a core link in infrastructure projects, has long been plagued by pain points such as low efficiency of manual operations, large quality fluctuations, and rising labor costs. Recently, Shandong Zhongji Luyuan Machinery launched a heavyweight new product - the steel cage welding workstation. With breakthrough advantages such as fully automated operations and intelligent data empowerment, it has redefined the industry standards for steel bar processing and injected strong momentum into the intelligent transformation of the construction industry.
![Cage Welding Workstation]( "Cage Welding Workstation")
"The traditional steel cage processing requires 3-4 skilled welders to work together. Not only can each person only complete 1-2 standard steel cages per day on average, but problems such as missing welding and insufficient welding at the welding joints also often lead to quality rework," said Engineer Wang, Technical Director of Zhongji Luyuan Machinery. He noted that this industry pain point is the core starting point for the R&D of the new product. The newly launched
steel cage welding workstation is innovatively equipped with 8 sets of industrial-grade welding robots, which realize millisecond-level collaborative linkage through the PLC numerical control system. The whole process from main reinforcement feeding,
automatic material distribution, 3D inspection and positioning to pulse welding forming requires no manual intervention.
At the demonstration site, the reporter saw that after the coiled main reinforcement was accurately pushed to the processing platform by the automatic feeding mechanism, 8 sets of robots immediately divided their work and collaborated according to the preset program: 2 sets were responsible for calibrating the spacing of the main reinforcement, with the error controlled within ±0.5 mm; 4 sets carried out welding operations simultaneously, and each welding joint only took 1.2 seconds to weld, with the weld penetration evenly meeting the standards; the remaining 2 sets conducted real-time inspection of the welding quality to ensure defect-free forming. "The workstation can process 30-40 12-meter-long steel cages per day on average, which is more than 5 times the efficiency of the traditional mode," the on-site operator said. He only needs to complete parameter settings through the touch screen to monitor the entire production process.
Digital empowerment is another highlight of the workstation. The intelligent data collection system built into the equipment can record 12 core data items in real time, such as the length of each main reinforcement, welding position, and welding current, and synchronize them to the cloud management platform through the 5G module. "In the past, the splicing of double cages required repeated manual measurement and calibration. Now, we only need to retrieve the system data to achieve accurate docking, increasing the splicing efficiency by 40%," said General Manager Li, head of a general contracting unit for bridge projects. He added that the data traceability also enables quality control to be implemented throughout the entire process, completely solving the problem of difficult quality traceability in traditional processing.
The significant reduction in labor costs has also been well-received by enterprises. Based on the average monthly salary of 8,000 yuan for welders in the construction industry, the annual labor cost of a steel cage team under the traditional processing mode exceeds 300,000 yuan. However, the workstation only requires one operator to complete the entire production process, saving nearly 250,000 yuan in annual labor costs. "Our project department saved more than 60,000 yuan in labor costs in just one month of trial use, and the equipment investment can be recovered within half a year," said the on-site manager of an infrastructure project in Shandong, providing intuitive cost accounting.
![Cage Welding Workstation]( "Cage Welding Workstation")
In terms of adaptive design, the workstation demonstrates strong flexibility. Whether it is a double main reinforcement and double winding reinforcement steel cage required for bridge pile foundations, or a single main reinforcement and single winding reinforcement product used for subway foundation pit support, the operator only needs to call the corresponding template in the system, and the equipment can automatically switch the processing mode, with the model change time not exceeding 10 minutes. This "one machine for multiple uses" feature enables it to adapt to construction needs in multiple fields such as highways, railways, and municipal engineering, significantly enhancing the equipment's market competitiveness.
"The launch of the workstation is the crystallization of Zhongji Luyuan's 15 years of in-depth cultivation in the construction machinery field," said General Manager Zhang of the company. He stated that the enterprise will optimize the equipment based on user feedback and develop an upgraded version suitable for ultra-large steel cage processing in the next step. Industry experts pointed out that the application of this workstation not only promotes the transformation of steel bar processing from the "manual era" to the "intelligent era" but also provides a replicable equipment solution for the industrial transformation of the construction industry.
