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TMS upgrades motion control equipment

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 21, 2008

When TMS (Tissue Manufacturing Service) required an upgrade for failing and obsolete motion control equipment on aged Italian manufactured tissue wrapping machinery they turned to Trio Motion.

An MC224 Motion Coordinator controller was combined with a six-axis brushless servo system to provide a drop-in replacement that mimicked the machine's web tension, electronic cam and registration functions.

TMS, based near Bologna, specialise in maintenance and repair of packaging machinery and had all but ran out of ways to patch up its old machines.

TMS hit on the idea of producing as near a form-fit retrofit as possible and commissioned local systems integrator, FAE Engineering, to help develop the solution that has now been launched as the TmotionS.

FAE has experience in industrial automation systems and has used Trio Motion products to provide critical motion control for several years.

Trio's independent policy towards its customer's choice of drives, motors and communications has allowed FAE the freedom to match application requirements with a wide range of drive and motor technologies.

The TmotionS is mechanically interchangeable with the old solution, having the same mounting configuration and featuring a front-faced interfacing panel with an identical DB connector arrangement.

Installation involves bolting it into the existing panel and connecting cable assemblies for the existing brushless servo motors and encoders, and hooking up the interfacing cables to the wrapping machine's PLC.

Behind the interfacing panel, six interconnected brushless servo amplifiers provide the power and precision to drive the servo motors with +/-10V control from two MC224 Motion Coordinators.

From the outset, it was fundamentally important that rather than reprogram the main PLC, the controller must provide a functionally identical performance as the existing servo controls.

The MC224 uses 32-bit floating point DSP technology that can provide up to 24 axes of synchronised motion with machine I/O and communications.

Each MC224 includes four processor slots and a system of axis expansion modules.

The processor slots can be populated with any combination of axis, fieldbus and/or digital drive daughter boards, and the axis expanders by any combination of axis daughter boards.

For the TmotionS, the two MC244's are linked via an axis expander and house six servo encoder cards and a master reference encoder card, with the existing PLC logic triggering pre-programmed events through the Motion Coordinator's built-in I/O using Trio Basic to handle electronic cam and axis synchronised registration on the machine.

Trio's programming language includes motion and event handling commands with multitasking and subroutines that allows users to create modular programs quickly.

With its high processing speed, multitasking architecture and control capabilities, faster cycle times have helped to optimise machine performance.

Consequently, the MC244 and the new servo drives together provide much smoother motion and higher process speeds.

Additionally, Trio's inherent safety protocols completely removed the previous tendency for axes 'running away' on error conditions.

The MC244 also offers the application improved print registration accuracy, enhancing finished product quality and yield.

Higher acceleration/deceleration characteristics with less vibration helps contribute to faster production throughput.

Smoother operation means reduced wear on critical mechanical parts.

Other benefits of the TmotionS's fit-function approach is that machine commissioning is very fast - with virtually no downtime and no PLC reprogramming.

As all the equipment used in the solution is new and modern, the element of future proofing is restored for these particular wrapping machines, extending useful life even further.