Summary
Prism Systems was hired to provide a centralized control system, with recipe management, for an existing automotive weather strip extrusion line. The existing process consisted of stand-alone pieces of equipment including Extruders, Curing Ovens, Conveyors, Pullers, and Flock House that were not interconnected and were operated manually. Consequently, due to the manual nature of the operation, it was difficult to startup, and the quality of the product was inconsistent. The customer wanted a centralized system that could be used for line control, alarming, provide a way to manage the parameters such as temperature, line speed, and pressures, prevent the operators from changing the parameters without the engineer's permission, and have the capability to monitor, create, and maintain parameters both locally and from a web-based interface.
Solution
Prism Systems developed an architecture utilizing Allen-Bradley Compact I/O, distributed over five enclosures, on DeviceNet to with an Allen-Bradley ControlLogix processor for the line control system. RSView32 was used on two workstations at either end of the extrusion line, with two PanelView 1000s installed at critical locations on the extrusion line. The RSView32 application was designed so that the extrusion engineer could "tune" the parameters for a given part and save them as a recipe, or if an adjustment was necessary, the modified parameters could be saved to the current recipe. A copy of the recipe was also saved to a Microsoft SQL server, utilizing a custom service and RSLinx. The extrusion engineer could also create or modify recipes using a custom web-based recipe management application. Any modifications that were made on the website were automatically transferred to the PLC.
Customer Benefits
- Centralized control of the extrusion line
- Local and remote recipe management
- Greatly reduced startup times
- Scrap rate reduced by 40 percent
- Removed unauthorized operator adjustments
Technologies
- Allen-Bradley ControlLogix
- Rockwell Automation RSView32
- Rockwell Automation RSViewME
- DeviceNet
- Allen-Bradley Compact I/O