Faster and Safer with Greater Efficiency

Source from:  worldtobacco.co.uk 26 July 2007 07/27/2007

While the buildings mentioned above feature automation for lighting and in the case of the Carre Theatre, for stage scenery and curtains, the BMW three series production line in South Africa features automation on the machinery that assembles its axle in 320 seconds. All these applications are provided by German company Beckhoff Automation which supplies automation solutions to the tobacco industry's biggest players, as well as building control applications. Beckhoff Automation's first technical seminar for the tobacco industry, held early in June, focussed on how increasing automation of manufacturing processes in the tobacco industry can lead to greater efficiency, reduced downtime, lower overheads and greater user safety. With customers such as GD, Hauni, Focke, Colin Mear Engineering and Garbuio Dickinson, as well as Imperial Tobacco, Philip Morris and BAT, Beckhoff has a wide range of experience in the industry. In his opening presentation the family-owned firm's Managing Director Hans Beckhoff outlined the dramatic growth the company has enjoyed since the 1980s, reaching Euro190mn sales last year. He noted that the two main types of automation control; centralised and decentralised. Following Mr Beckhoff's introduction, Sales and Marketing Manager for the tobacco industry Christian Schulze described the company's applications in the tobacco industry. He revealed that Beckhoff technology is applied in both primary and secondary manufacturing functions, as well as building control and measurement applications. Mr Schulze noted that the tobacco industry tended towards decentralised control in the primary manufacturing process, despite this option being approximately 30% more expensive, as it offers faster and simpler implementation, while the machines can be bought from different suppliers, and it offers more redundancy than a centralised option. Moreover, decentralised control for the primary processing allows for greater flexibility in changes such as rebuilding, enlargement or closing of different areas of the line as each process area has its own control. Mr Schulze noted that the drawbacks of using decentralised automation control on primary lines is that it is more expensive and complex with more programs which have to be backed up and greater complexity in the integration of safety terminals. Conversely, the industry tends towards centralised control in secondary manufacturing, partly due to the fast growing CPU capacity which allows more functions to be incorporated in one CPU, to the point of running programmable logic control (PLC), motion, human machine interface (HMI) and in the future scientific automation too. Beckhoff has introduced a new glue applicator with extreme accuracy due to what Mr Schulze described as its precise positioning and exact drop by drop volume. He noted that the timing of the glue nozzle opening can be specified with a resolution in the nanosecond range. Moving on to measurement, Mr Schulze described how Beckhoff is able to replace expensive special measuring boards with a software as the company's EtherCAT and TwinCAT combined with its 200 different input and output (I/O) signal types is able to collect and evaluate several different signals at extremely high speeds. X-HEAD: Imperial Tobacco – creating the future Imperial Tobacco's Project Engineering Manager Ulf Bank described his simplification of the company's manufacturing strategy using Beckhoff technology asserting that "The best way to predict the future is to create it." He described the situation in 2003 at Imperial as featuring "more than 30 different control systems, more than 15 different visualisation systems, several different bus systems and different systems in primary, secondary, OTP and the paper division." He aimed to lower the initial costs and system complexity, minimise the number of control suppliers and combine multiple control disciplines in a single control engine. Mr Bank chose the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard 61131-3 for all programming, noting that only PC-based controls could fulfil the company's motion control requirements. He highlighted the widespread use of the IEC61131-3 standard in the PLC and motion control industry, its well-known look and feel which negated the need to learn a new language, and the fact that it is independent of the hardware used as reasons for this choice. He cited simplification and lower cost compared to PLCs as the company's reasons for moving to PC-based controls. He noted that Imperial chose Beckhoff systems as TwinCAT complies with IEC61131-3, and again, running all control devices on a single platform allows for greater simplicity. Moreover, Beckhoff's offering of a wide scope of I/Os and interfaces and its wide range of controllers and its safety features contributed to his decision to use Beckhoff. Imperial's primary lines are now fully PC-based, with a modular set-up using Beckhoff's CX1020 covering all areas such as feeding, dust room, with single modular devices integrated into other control systems. Mr Bank concluded that the modular approach to Imperial's primary set-up had been taken as it is the simplest way of integrating new or relocated equipment into primaries, is cheaper and installation was faster than a centralised system. Moreover, the increased line availability with faster diagnostics and increased fault tolerance which complements the increased investment protection against obsolescence, relocation and upgrade also figured in the decision-making process. Enditem