High Speed Wrapper Controls (Nuovafima-Sweet Magic Controls Upgrade)

IPACT was asked by a large candy manufacturer to replace the control system on a high-speed candy wrapping machine. The existing control system consisted of an Allen-Bradley SLC500 PLC, 2 FlexPac AC drives, 2 European servo drives, DeviceNet to Modbus Bridge and Flex I/O. The system supplied by the OEM was difficult to troubleshoot and maintain and did not lend itself to modification as needed by the candy manufacturer to accommodate product changes.

The solution was to install a new Allen-Bradley ControLogix motion system. The new system would replace the SLC-500 PLC with a ControLogix processor and local I/O. The AC drives and European servos would be replaced by Kinetix 6000 Servo Drives and motors. The Kinetix Servo Drives would interface with the Contrologix processor using a SERCOS interface module.

The system upgrade resulted in a 60% improvement in servo setup time and a 10% improvement in machine speed. The candy manufacturer now enjoys the open architecture of the ControLogix motion system. They can readily tune and modify cam profiles and change motion sequences to suit various product needs.

Benefits:

•  Simple system architecture, with an 8-Mb SERCOS communications loop to the Kinetix 6000 servo drives the communications bottleneck is eliminated.

• All motion instructions and servo configuration reside in the ControLogix PLC, no more black box.

• Motion cam profiles for infeed belt and film feed can be created and/or modified in a spread sheet or RSLogix graphical interface.

• High speed film registration using standard motion instructions with control loop located in the ControlLogix PLC.

Integrated Process Automation & Control Technologies