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Challenge:
In a manufacturing line, the maximum throughput of the line is determined by the slowest component in the line. In this case, the customer's throughput was limited to 200 bottles per minute by the packaging equipment. To improve the throughput of the line, (which was capable of a maximum of 1000 bottles per minute, without the packaging bottle neck), the customer wanted to divert the line to 5 packaging machines, each capable of 200 bottles per minute, thus increasing his throughput to 1000 bottles per minute. The customer needed to do several product changeovers (bottle size, quantity per case, etc.) per day, and wanted to use just one control for all of the machine functions including I/O and intelligent control. In addition he wanted to make the machine easy to use, by making product changeovers with just a turn of a rotary switch.
Requirements
| Load |
200 lbs |
| Speed |
10 in/sec |
| Duty Cycle |
70% |
| Repeatability |
0.010" |
| Programmability |
8 different combinations of bottle size and package quantity |
| Interface |
Thumbwheel Switch and RS232 Interface for programming |
Solution:
| Control |
Integrated servo control/drive |
| Actuator |
Electric cylinder |
A High thrust and duty cycle electric cylinder is coupled with control/drive's high level programming language. The conditional branching math and counter functions allowed the control to know when to shift lanes, and the ability to skip a lane if a bottle jam had been detected by remote photo eyes. The flexible optically-isolated I/O allowed the customer to control all of the inputs and outputs without needing any additional interface modules. This customer had considered using pneumatics or building the system from components and using another manufacturer's control. Compared to the pneumatic solution, the servo system offered much simpler set up (versus moving the hard stops on the pneumatic cylinder), which cuts production downtime significantly. The cost savings realized from the additional production (as well as lower maintenance costs) quickly overcame the initial saving of the pneumatic system.
Application Solutions
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