OVERVIEW

Europe’s leading manufacturer of craft products wanted to reduce raw material wastage in their production process. A common cause of producing waste is using raw materials inefficiently, which is an additional and unnecessary business cost. In the case of the craft manufacturer, wastage was cause by variations in raw materials, which resulted in a lack of accuracy in the cutting process.

SOLUTION

After analysing the existing system and processes, NIE recommended retrofitting modern industrial equipment to the existing cutting machine. Utilizing motors with integral encoders, driving precision ballscrews, the encoder feedback fed directly into a Pixsys PL250, while built in motion control algorithms ensured accurate positioning. A TD320 touch screen provided an intuitive operating interface, which allowed engineers to access protected parameters to initially set up the machines operation.

RESULT

The flexibility of the programming and the imaginative engineering work allowed the machine to function far beyond its original specification - Reducing wastage of raw materials and significantly increasing throughput.

NIE’s design team helped a leading research laboratory reducing processing times by design a complete control system for a specialist mixer used in food, paint or chemical development labs. The system consists of spindle motor forward/reverse motion, raise and lower pillar, timer, tachometer readout and direction/standstill indicators.

The final design consisted of two circuit boards: The first contains the power supply, the power output stages, isolating opto-couplers, and the tachometer circuit. The second PCB holds the low voltage logic circuit, timer circuit and tactile keypad switches. The two boards are adjoined by a PCB header and spacer pillars, and mount directly behind a specially produced membrane such that the keypad switches are flush with the membrane. The logic circuit was designed around a programmable logic device, which controls all of the machine functions. The membrane was also designed by NIE and produced at a local firm.