Automation Expansion for Automotive Rubber Plants

Completed an automation expansion for a rubber process  formulas to produce cording material for complete automotive transmission belt manufacturing.

CLIENT: Rubber Power Transmission Belts & Fluid Power Manufacturer

INDUSTRY: Automotive & Mobile Equipment

KEY FEATURES:

• Wonderware system platform installation
• Allen-Bradley batching software installation
• ACP ThinManager used for mobile management of factory applications
• Complete electrical design and controls for rubber plant
• Automated mixing phases to extract real-time agitator runtime data
• Restructured faster batch startup – updating from three-step button process to a two-step process.
• Latest ControlLogix update and historical alarm data screen added
• Alarm logger database residing on terminal server

CORE CHALLENGES:

Updating existing communications and equipment for proper data collection. Modifications to the existing system was initially a challenge due to outdated and unreliable network connection.
Redirecting PLC tags for three additional lines
Automated temperature control for cement mixers was difficult to implement because the agitator refused to start due to the interlock on the temperature. The problem was a phase that stopped the temperature control and reset to 0. When the next batch calls for the agitator to run the setpoint is still 0. We solved the issue by changing the temperature control programming to use a Cooling Enabled Bit instead of changing the setpoint back to 0.