Ultrasonic cutting technology is used by Newtech’s range of cheese cutters, which enables them to cleanly and accurately cut all shapes – including round, wheel, block and extruded varieties.
When the company decided to bring its code development operations in-house, it needed a controller that could offer reliability, ease of programmability and a modern, compact design. The new programming environment also needed to allow for fast configuration, programming and offline simulation, owing to the tight delivery timescales demanded by many of its customers. Omron’s Sysmac NJ controller met the requirements.
Forming part of the Sysmac automation platform, the NJ provides synergy with the whole Omron range of Sysmac devices, including the variable speed drives, servos and remote input/output systems used by Newtech in its cutting machines. The decision to update the controller to a Sysmac NJ therefore also offered the company a good foundation for more of its future control systems to be based upon the Sysmac NJ.
Alan Smith, field application engineer for Omron Electronics, explained that one of the main features on the controller of interest to Newtech was its single programming environment. He said: “Omron’s new Sysmac Studio programming environment features just one embedded system with a programming environment that allows you to link together all the various control architectures. This greatly simplifies the programming operation, increasing application development productivity and helping to speed up time to market for new product developments.”
The controller uses the high speed EtherCAT network to link to a huge range of devices. It also runs PLCopen motion function blocks, and adheres to the commonly used IEC 61131 industrial control programming standard. Not only should a control engineer immediately understand the technologies, making migration to the new controller easy, but the resulting code should also be more reliable, better structured, and therefore more readable. This means lower maintenance costs throughout the life of the machine it is controlling.
The first cutting machine to benefit from the control upgrade was the Autosonic-E machine which is designed to accurately and consistently cut extruded cheese products. This includes a robot that controls the cutting action of the ultrasonic blade. However, it is also necessary to sense exactly where a product is on the conveyor and at what speed it is travelling, so that this information can be communicated to the robot to enable accurate cutting.
“The machine control that relates to the movement of product is controlled by the Sysmac NJ, while the cutting action of the blade is controlled by the robot,” said Phil Waters, sales manager at Newtech. In addition, communication between the robot and the Sysmac NJ is via the DeviceNet protocol.
As an added benefit, the company can now offer a machine with remote diagnostics and troubleshooting features – it can connect to equipment anywhere in the world from its UK offices.
“The food sector tends to focus more on production and product, rather than automated equipment,” said Waters. “So anything we can offer that provides our customers with peace of mind regarding machine maintenance is a benefit.”
Omron Electronics
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