Drive upgrade suits new bagging machines

A Siemens Automation and Drives product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Mar 13, 2008

Engineers from Siemens AandD joined the Sandiacre team to carry out a detailed analysis of the company's new control system.

Hayssen Sandiacre has re-evaluated its machine lines and now offers a choice of automation platforms using technology from Siemens Automation and Drives (AandD).

"To maintain a competitive edge, it is vital that we continuously develop and expand our machine offering in order to meet our customers' requirements", according to Simon Lagoe, Managing Director, Hayssen Sandiacre, Europe.

"We had been re-evaluating our existing offering for a while when we received an order from a major food manufacturer for a new line of vertical bagging machines - the design spec of which stipulated Siemens' motion control technology".

"This proved to be the catalyst for change we needed and we committed ourselves to an ambitious programme to upgrade the control system on several of our existing machine lines".

To ensure that the new control solution was tailored both to customer and manufacturer requirements, engineers from Siemens AandD joined the Sandiacre team to carry out a detailed analysis of the machinery in question.

The Sandiacre team had several key criteria which the new technology had to meet.

The performance of the new solution had to be at least as good as that provided by the company's incumbent supplier in order to safeguard the company's reputation with existing customers.

The team was also keen to replicate as much of the existing controls as possible in order to avoid the need to completely rewrite important customer documents, such as operator manuals and installation and maintenance guides.

Secondly, the machine footprint could not alter, so the control system had to be a similar size to the existing controls.

Finally, it had to be cost-effective.

In addition to these strict criteria, the team also had a project timescale of three months from the beginning of the project to completion.

The Siemens solution was to combine a Simotion D machine controller with a Sinamics S120 four-axis drive platform and 1Fk7 servomotors and planetary in-line gearboxes.

This solution not only met all of the team's criteria but surpassed some of them, including actually reducing the overall footprint of the bagging machines.

"Siemens exceeded our expectations throughout the project", said Jim Goodwin, Engineering Director, Hayssen Sandiacre Europe.

"Not only was the solution simple and straightforward to implement across several of our vertical bagging machines, but the fact that we had a Siemens engineer on site throughout the project to help and guide the in-house engineering team was invaluable".

"When developing the new solution we decided to start from scratch and write much of the code blocks and programming ourselves, rather than relying on standard software".

"Siemens were on hand throughout to help with this and together we turned the project around remarkably quickly, shipping the first upgraded machine to our customer within three months and surpassing any previous machine development timescale we had been involved in".

"Following the success of this first installation, we are now in the process of phasing the upgrade across the rest of our intermittent bagging machines, with a view to then roll this out further next year across our continuous motion bagging line".