Pipe Rollup Machine

[Peejay 0]

Hi everyone, Well, I hope I'm not in over my head here, but for my first PLC project I'm building a pipe rollup machine. It's basically just a duplicate of what we already have, except the other machine I built with an embedded microprocessor based controller. Since it has customised electronics I thought I would go with a PLC system this time so I'm not the only one who can fix it when it breaks! What this machine does: On one end we have a 400m spool of 13mm polly pipe (garden irrigation stuff). This then goes past a hotmelt glue gun where a bead of glue is applied every 50cm. 80mm wide fabric is then wrapped around the pipe. This is fed past a sewing machine where the edges of the fabric are joined, and finally it is rolled up onto a spool (200m and 50m for now). Line speed past the sewing machine must remain constant, and be variable from 0 - 33m/min. In the other machine we have two SEW eurodrive units linked, but I don't like them and want to find better units. Now for the fun part: The final spool must move back and fowards so that the rolls are even and neatly rolled. In the other machine I did this by varing the speed of the motor that moved the spool, making it proportional to the product type, length and line speed. This works ok, but would be much better if I could just send a position signal rather than a speed signal. I'm looking at Omron gear at the moment, it seems the easiest to get in Australia, but other sugestions are ok. Budget is $0 or as close to it as possible! Things are very tight at the moment.

[plcman 0]

Hi Take a look at the Control Techniques Unidrive SP solutions platform. These inverters can work in open loop, vector mode and in servo mode, more importantly they have programmable plug in application modules which allow you to control the logic and motion from one piece of kit with no analogue I/O etc. Also when more than one axis is required they can be linked over various field bus options. Regards Alan Edwards www.wolfautomation.co.uk