High Speed Ice Cream Bar Manufacturing Line

IPACT was extensively involved in the engineering of a modern, highly automated, high speed ice cream bar manufacturing line.  The line receives liquid ice cream, freezes, sticks, coats, and wraps, and produces boxes of frozen ice cream bars for shipment at the rate of 400 bars per minute.  Services were provided in three major areas: line automation standards, extrude and wire cut, and bar production.

Line Automation Standards

Parts of the line equipment were purchased from six different vendors, each of whom supplied their own Level 1 control and PC-based HMI.  The customer wanted all of the Level 1 systems to be designed similarly (for ease of maintenance), and also wanted to be able to integrate all six (6) of the HMI applications into a single, large application after delivery.  In order to insure this, IPACT wrote engineering design and implementation standards for the Level 1 logic and the PC-based HMI package.  These standards became part of the engineering specification that the customer provided to each vendor.

Extrude And Wire Cut

IPACT also designed and implemented the control and HMI portions of the critical section of the line - the so-called "extrude and wire cut" section, where ice cream was extruded, sticks inserted, and bars cut and transported.  Since that process was designed in a new and unique way, a prototype of that section of the line was built to provide a "proof of concept" for the methodology.  IPACT engineered and implemented the motion control for this prototype, which was a servo-based, five axis system, where the motions in all five axes were complex and closely coupled to one another.  IPACT also designed and implemented a PC-based HMI for the prototype, which interfaced directly with the motion control LAN.  Once proven on the prototype, IPACT carried through this design and implementation to the production system, installed it, and started it up.

Bar Production

This area entailed all the processes that were necessary to produce ice cream bars outside of extruding, cutting, and handling, and included ice cream metering, mixing, variegating, flavoring, maltodextrin addition, freezing, inclusion addition, coating, and liquid N2 dipping.  IPACT engineers designed, implemented, and commissioned all the control systems (some of which were complex and well beyond the scope of standard PID control), process sequencing and HMI/SCADA systems for these processes.  This included the ability for the operator to take over any piece of equipment (motors, solenoids, divert valves, etc.) or any PID manually from the HMI without the necessity of interrupting the entire process.  The HMI/SCADA system also included recipe management for the entire line.

Integrated Process Automation & Control Technologies