The perfect Yorkshire pudding has helped Mitsubishi Electric to win a prestigious technology award at the food processing industry’s most important annual event, Appetite for Engineering

19th July 2011
Source: Mitsubishi
Posted By : ES Admin
The perfect Yorkshire pudding has helped Mitsubishi Electric to win a prestigious technology award at the food processing industry’s most important annual event, Appetite for Engineering

Mitsubishi provided sophisticated modern drive and control equipment to WMH Automation UK so it could develop a servo-based system that irons out the inaccuracies of batter pumping for a frozen food manufacturer. The system consisted of a 10 axis J3 servo drive arrangement, with each axis linked to Mitsubishi's high-speed SSC motion control network. Nine of the axes are dedicated to the depositors, each driving 32 pump chambers. The servos are each programmed with a map of known volume to be dispensed and the required number of rotations can be calculated depending on the required product settings.

The controller used in the system, the Mitsubishi Q170M CPU, can process motion and logic programmes simultaneously. In effect it is a standalone motion controller with built-in PLC (programmable logic controller). Judges in the Appetite for Engineering Awards, run by Food Processing magazine were impressed by the ease of programming, installation and use.

The Q170M is proving to be a revelation, particularly in operations requiring high speed, high accuracy, high frequency machine operations, which are typical of food processing and packaging operations. Jeremy Shinton of Mitsubishi explains:

“Logic control and motion control are often seen as different disciplines, because they were developed separately. One is based on discrete values the other on infinite variability. For this reason they are often seen as different disciplines. However today’s machine builders are sophisticated control technologists who naturally prefer to develop their logic and motion requirements side by side. The Q170M allows them to do this easily and to produce a simple elegant control architecture.”

The Q170M offers connectivity to Mitsubishi’s Servo System Controller Network (SSCNET III), one of the largest motion networks in the world with an installed base of more than 1.5 million axes.

“The Q170M CPU combines powerful PLC and motion controller technology from the iQ Automation platform into a single unit,” says Barry Weller, a Mitsubishi motion specialist. “This means that the Q170M CPU delivers to machine OEMs the same high performance benefits that would be otherwise only available in a top-of-the-line rack-based solution. This gives a competitive advantage to machine designs.”

The new Q170M CPU stand-alone motion controller offers high-performance control of positioning, speed, synchronous phase and torque, and offers on-the-fly mode switching and registration through electronic cam and gearing.

The compact design allows side-by-side mounting with MR-J3B servo drives for reduced panel space requirements, and the ability to operate rotary and linear motors and fully closed loop systems. Quick release connectors reduce wiring and setup time and the amplifiers are plug-and-play. All operating parameters are instantly downloaded at power up, and servo axis tuning and in-plant replacement of servo drives are quick and easy.

The Q170M CPU features a 24V DC power supply, Ethernet connectivity and both USB and serial ports along with serial and external encoder interface modules and high-speed registration inputs. The units support up to 512 DI/DO, network modules such as CC-Link, analog DI/DO, and temperature modules through cable connections to the iQ platform rack.

“Today’s OEMs and end users require not only improved CPUs to boost functionality, performance and cost efficiency, but also higher overall throughput,” reckons Jeremy. “The Q170M CPU delivers higher throughput because of its high-speed, synchronous 50Mbps optical communication network and its accuracy in motion synchronisation and speed/position/torque control.

“The command communication cycle time of the MR-J3 servo is reduced to 0.44 msec with the Q170M. This means that multi-axis machines always run in precise synchronisation, no matter how fast they cycle.”

Accepting the Award on behalf of Mitsubishi, Jeremy acknowledged the contribution of WMH Automation: “This project was very much a collaborative effort with engineers from both companies forming a seamless team. Advanced solutions such as demonstrated with this project cannot but achieved simply by fitting latest technology, there has to be the sort of total understanding of the user requirements that can only be built up through years of emersion in the field. They guys from WHM were able to translate the food processing demands into a motion engineering specification and work towards this optimum solution.”


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