A major manufacturer of steel building products asked Mobile Automation to interface and modernise several roll-forming mills — bringing them onto the plant network, adding PLC control and encoder feedback, and improving machine safety.
Walking every mill with its operators
Each mill was recorded as it runs today.
- Stile and stud mills walked with their operators before anything was rewired
- I/O confirmed against the panels
- Existing drawings marked up with modifications collected over the years
- Photographs and video captured as a programming reference
Every mill onto the plant network
Data cable was run from the control cabinets back to the data hub.
- Heritage, Stile, Novataur, sectional and D-panel lines cabled, terminated, labelled and tested
- Existing junction-box patches re-terminated and RJ45s refitted
- A machine computer that had never been terminated brought onto the network
- Unmanaged switches, power supplies and interface modules fitted into the cabinets
- New GPOs, RCBOs and data points at the operator positions
PLC control, safety and HMI on each line
New enclosures carried the control and safety hardware.
- Siemens PLCs with an encoder and analogue card for drive communication
- Sheet-detection proximity sensors and a touch-screen HMI
- Safety contactors on individual guard and emergency-stop inputs
Job data over Ethernet, proved on a test CPU
The D-panel mill's job data moved from serial to Ethernet.
- Anybus Communicator installed to carry the job data over Ethernet
- D-panel project loaded into our own Allen-Bradley L32E CPU, its I/O inhibited, so the running machine never needed reflashing
- Transfer proved against the Anybus web interface and the communications configuration confirmed
- Code written to move values from the Anybus module into the correct PLC tags
- HMI project used to confirm which tags an operator writes by hand
- Notch punch conditioned with a one-shot so it fires once per stroke
- Shear-complete signal latched so it reads reliably between scans
The results
- All five mill lines on the plant network, labelled and tested
- Job data reaching the D-panel mill over Ethernet in place of serial
- Each job sent once only, matched to the mill's own job queue
- Guard and emergency-stop inputs on dedicated safety contactors