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Test and Measurement Automation

Sausage Casing
Sausage Casing

PLC Conversion for Sausage Converting Machine

Summary

DMC upgraded an obsolete control system on a sausage casing converting machine. DMC replaced and reprogrammed the outdated PLC and added data collection and advanced recipe management.

Customer Benefits

  • Increases productivity with reduced job setup time
  • Improves system maintainability with replacement of outdated control hardware
  • Protects against data loss through use of backup storage for recipe and production data
  • Allows process improvements and more informed production decisions through data collection system

Technologies

  • Siemens S7-317 PLC
  • Siemens Positioning Module FM 354 (Servo Controller)
  • Siemens Positioning Module FM 353 (Stepper Controller)
  • Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
  • Microsoft SQL Server

Solution

This machine is used to convert rolls of sausage casing and prepare them for the next step in production. The customer’s previous control system used an obsolete PLC that was no longer supported. The recipe system contained a handful of hard-coded recipes that could not be updated or added to and required the operator to enter dozens of parameters by hand for every job change.

 

DMC’s solution consists of Siemens hardware, a PC interface programmed in Microsoft Visual Studio, and a SQL Server database back-end. Recipes are easily added or modified through the flexible recipe management system, allowing the customer to immediately add more than 10 times the number of recipes stored on the old system. The system collects production data including production rate, up time, down time, and error incidents. All recipe and production data is stored both locally and on the network database.