Drive to produce more Pot Noodles
A
Control Techniques product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Jul 8, 2003
The drive is on to boost production of the UK's most popular hot snack food, and production lines are being improved to reduce downtime and increase throughput.
Unilever Best Foods, at Crumlin in South Wales manufactures some 150 million Pot Noodle snacks per year.
The drive is on to boost production to meet the ever-increasing demand for fast-food ready in moments, and production lines are being improved to reduce downtime and increase throughput.
That is the background to production line 3, recently automated to give greater reliability and production.
"We have upgraded all three lines with Unidrive variable speed drives from Control Techniques", explains Project Manager at Unilever, Mark Edwards.
"Line three had been running Control Techniques Vector drives for 10 years, and these had performed well, but we wanted to bring the whole line under PLC control, and so chose Unidrive with UD73 plug-in modules to give us Profibus connectivity".
"The result has been excellent, with the line exceeding its daily targets.
The most crucial factor has been synchronism of the drives from the process and through to the packaging section".
The line comprises a number of pasta mixing and processing operations, and a feed into the next section completes the packaging process.
There are 12 Unidrives on this section of line one, varying from 1.1kW for the fryers, up to 7.5kW for the roller drives and communicating via Profibus with the PLC.
Each motor on the line (Leroy Somer MV AC motors) is fitted with a 1024 pulse per revolution incremental encoder feeding back to its drive.
The speed of the line as a whole is taken from a reference on the rotary cutter Unidrive and is digitally locked, with a small offset on two of the drives on the stretcher conveyor and steamer to provide slight stretching of the noodles.
Adjustment of this offset gives a direct correlation with the weight of the noodles in each pot.
If any drive fails, the line stops, the exception being the sheeter drive, whereupon the line will continue until all noodles have been processed through.
In the cutter section, three drives are in a separate control loop, with absolute encoders providing precise synchronism.
At the end of this section, an additional encoder provides a reference signal for the subsequent packaging section.
"The PLC only provides initiation and switches on fans and pumps", says Edwards.
"All of the programming is on the coprocessor modules within the drives themselves.
This gives us added flexibility if there is a problem and means that the whole line doesn't stop unnecessarily.
We find that Unidrive is ideal and all three lines are fitted with them (a total of 31)".
Unidrive is the world's first truly universal AC drive - and is recognised as the standard to which other manufacturers aspire.
It encompasses open-loop V/F, open-loop sensorless vector, closed-loop flux vector and AC brushless servo, all in a single package.
Each control mode can be easily and quickly changed from the onboard keypad or through UniSoft, a Windows-based configuration software tool.
So users need only specify, stock and commission one AC drive product - Unidrive - from 0.75kW to 1MW.
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Contact Control Techniques
Tel +44 1952 213 700
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