Retro­fit of a pack­ing plant with a 3 axes portal

Scope of work

The tar­get was to exe­cute a mod­erni­sa­tion and opti­ma­tion of an exist­ing plant that packs dri­ve shafts regard­ing hard- and soft­ware. The tech­nol­o­gy of the plant was quite obso­lete and it has to be updat­ed to the today´s state of the art. The chal­lenge of this project was main­ly the short time for com­mis­sion­ing. After mechan­i­cal and elec­tri­cal com­plete retro­fit in 4 days and 2 addi­tion­al days soft­ware set up pro­duc­tion can be restart­ed with a part of the plant. The start-up of the com­plete plant was done after two weeks. This was only pos­si­ble by a good prepa­ra­tion and sim­u­la­tion process­es previously.

Oper­a­tion of the plant

Regard­ing the oper­a­tion of the plant it must be men­tioned that there are two plant parts. On the first part the dri­ve shafts are con­veyed to a lift­ing table by means of a chain con­vey­or. After fetch­ing the shafts out of the sec­ond plant part by a por­tal the emp­ty pal­let on which the shafts are stored is con­veyed to the next plant by anoth­er chain con­vey­or. The sec­ond plant part has a 3 axes por­tal that is posi­tioned by ser­vo dri­ves. By means of that por­tal the dif­fer­ent shafts are con­veyed in a box espe­cial­ly pro­vid­ed for it. The logis­tics is done ful­ly automated.

Mod­erni­sa­tions

The plant was dis­as­sem­bled mechan­i­cal­ly and all wear parts are mod­ernised. In the course of that the pneu­mat­ic com­po­nents are also replaced. Regard­ing the elec­tri­cal instal­la­tion the switch­board cab­i­net includ­ing oper­a­tor pan­el was replaced. For safe­ty func­tions a safe­ty con­trol with cor­re­spond­ing safe­ty com­po­nents (safe­ty door switch­es, safe­ty brake) was insert­ed. By using an oper­at­ing inter­face espe­cial­ly made for the plant it becomes pos­si­ble to mon­i­tor all process con­di­tions of the entire plant.

CE and documentation

On the basis of the new dec­la­ra­tion of con­for­mi­ty of the plant an exten­sive doc­u­men­ta­tion includ­ing risk eval­u­a­tion accord­ing to appen­dix VII of the EC machin­ery direc­tive has to be made.