Bottle Packaging Line Controls Upgrade
Some robot integration experts reached out to me because they needed a controls resource to help with upgrading an obsolete system. This system sends slugs of empty bottles down 4 lanes, one slug per lane at a time, and uses a robot to pick up groups of bottles to place into a box. That box is then sent into a palletizer.
It was installed about 20 years ago and consisted of an obsolete Fanuc robot, obsolete Allen Bradley PLC and HMI, as well as an obsolete servo drive controlled via DeviceNet. Since the robot controller enclosure was so large, much of the control system hardware was installed in there. That meant designing an entirely new control enclosure, reusing what hardware was worth keeping, but upgrading everything else.
The servo was upgraded to a Kinetix5300 controlled over Ethernet/IP and both the PLC and HMI were upgraded to a newer CompactLogix and a PanelView 5000 series.
While I had very little freedom to truly redo the HMI because the customer wanted everything to remain as close as possible to the original, it definitely needed a makeover with some high-performance HMI styling and that’s what I did. Below are screenshots of two of the screens that are part of the application.
Most of the PLC code stayed untouched. It was quite complex and there was no need to re-invent it. Only a few areas needed to significantly change - Alarming, VFD control, Servo position control, and some software handshaking between the PLC and the new Fanuc robot.
Alarming is done very differently with View Designer than with FactoryTalk View ME as was used for the old HMI. That was redone using the Alarm Manager inside of Studio 5000.
Conveyor control was previously done using an older PowerFlex 4 and hardwired IO. That was replaced with a PowerFlex 525 controlled and monitored over Ethernet/IP. One feature the customer really liked was being able to change the speed setpoint from the HMI, something I added. Previously, there were just two setpoints via drive parameters and a PLC output that switched between the two.
Position control for which of the 4 lanes to send bottles down was previously done using an old Ultra3000 servo controlled over DeviceNet. The system was experiencing a high number of faults related to DeviceNet that was costing them production time.
That was replaced with a Kinetix5300 series servo drive using EtherNet/IP. All the DeviceNet code was removed and replaced as needed.
Lastly, the AOP for the Fanuc robot was setup for communication in bytes (8 bits) whereas the old PLC program used a generic Ethernet profile and 16-bits. So a lot of mapping needed to change to handle all the software handshaking between the PLC and Fanuc.
The end result was a successful commissioning and the system runs without the errors previously experienced that were resulting in downtime.
Upgrades are something I really enjoy. It’s nice to see an older system replaced with something newer that runs better. Get in contact with me to discuss upgrading obsolete equipment that is not running well, there is no support available for, or, worse, getting replacement parts would be difficult. The downtime can’t be risked.