Omron cures control
15 Jan 2000
Dew Valley Foods, producer of pre-cooked bacon to the catering industry, needed a high-speed food handling machine to increase production and launch them in to the more competitive retail supply sector. An ingenious machine design was needed to meet all the requirements of this demanding application.
The company approached Newtech to design and manufacture the solution in the UK. For Newtech, the machine was the biggest and most challenging it had tackled, requiring flexibility to deal with formatting bacon into packs of different sizes at high speed, and to meet all the hygiene requirements of the food industry.
Wisbech-based Newtech turned to Omron for a control solution. The machine uses a control system built around 14 servodrives - the majority used in the stacking operation - and 22 inverters, all under PLC control.
`The key to the design was the stacker,' says Newtech engineering manager Phil Thompson. `We had to prove not only that this could work, but that it would cope reliably with the throughput speed of the bacon. The bacon slices go through cooking and freezing processes, and are presented to our machine in four lanes. The speed of throughput meant the stacker needed to be able to handle three slices per second.'
MMIs provide the operator interface to the machine, allowing parameters such as pack sizes to be entered for each batch, and communicated to the PLCs.
