Challenges come in various categories. Sometimes they are really “geeky”; what if in a production process, the throughput of articles approaches the cycle time of the controlling PLC ? Many engineer will be stimulated by such a challenge. The CoNet engineers not the least!
Amsterdam-based company Van Dam manufactures dry offset printing machines. These machines are capable of printing plastic packaging material at high speeds. This in itself is nothing new, however, in this case, these particular printing machines had additional requirements. They also had to be able to print a base coat and finish on the plastic packaging material and this had to be done at exceptional high speed: the throughput of articles is 600 units per minute. That’s 10 per second!
The existing Van Dam machines are equipped with a Siemens HMI interface with push buttons. These are discontinued by Siemens. Consequently, Van Dam decided to overhaul the interface. The new machines were engineered with Siemens Touch Panels (TP1500). As these panels can only be programmed in TIA Portal, the entire machine control was converted to TAI Portal too.