The Mars plant in Veghel in the south of the Netherlands is the world's largest chocolate factory. In addition to producing products for the Dutch market, Europe and Europe, the Veghel plant supplies semi-finished products such as chocolate and peanuts to many other Mars plants. The plant also has its own snack and pet care product sales office in the Netherlands. They are constantly pursuing higher efficiency, improving production, eliminating bottlenecks and reducing costs by improving production machinery. The specific requirements for the servo drive of the box packaging machine on the “Snickers†production line, Kes Kleijn, Mars's improvement engineer Consulted with Emerson CT, one of the factory's main drive suppliers.
“We use Epsilon EP and Unidrive SP extensively,†explains Kees Kleijn. “However, for this project, the British CT company recommended us the latest servo product, the Digitax ST, which proved to be ideal. All CT drives are flexible. I am fully satisfied with other modified equipment (such as PLCs, drives or motors that may have been installed)."
The machine is designed to fit Snickers chocolate bars (or Mars chocolate bars or Snickers Cruncher chocolate bars) into the "display box" used at the point of sale. For different sizes of display boxes containing 24 or 36 chocolate bars, they can be packaged using the same machine. The chocolate bar is transported from the production line to the packaging machine, which is closed-loop controlled by a 4 kW motor and Unidrive SP and synchronized with the previous production line. The chocolate bar is then rotated 90° and moved to the “Collector†section controlled by the new Digitax ST servo drive. In this section the chocolate bars are conveyed onto a chain supply conveyor with a separator. To prevent damage to any product, the separator must be accurately positioned between the chocolate bars. Here, using the CT Epsilon EP servo-controlled pusher, six stacked chocolate bars are loaded into the display box from front to back, in a total of three rows (the display box with 24 packages has only two rows).
“For speed and accuracy, the collector application requires a servo controller,†says Kees Kleijn. “However, we also need more features. So we chose the Digitax ST Plus device with a full-featured motion controller to get The flexibility required. The driver uses the same programming software as the Uidrive SP programming software SyPT we used in development. With the safe torque off function and the drive retaining its memory, it can be stopped without returning to the origin. The position is precisely restarted to ensure that the shutdown process is absolutely safe and reliable. This saves a lot of downtime and effort during development and production. I am very surprised that such a small package can hold so many products! â€
Due to the increased speed of the collector, the machine's production has increased by 15% per minute. Mr. Kleijn is considering how to further increase the speed by upgrading the loading section.
Designed to meet the requirements of machine designers and system integrators, the Digitax ST Series is a compact servo drive with the following features: unmatched and flexible integration; optimized for servo applications requiring higher peak torque; excellent dynamic response Faster installation and startup; easy to integrate. Its four product lines are - Base, Indexer, EZ Motion and Digitax ST Plus.
The top-of-the-line product in this series is the Digitax ST Plus, which features the full-featured motion controller; optimized for high-performance machine units that require a drive-to-drive network; cam curves and synchronized motion control. The onboard drive to drive network can connect multiple axes and enable a true distributed controller. In the flexible IEC6113-3 software development environment, the advanced motion functions of the drive are programmed using the PLC open motion function block in CT's SyPTPRO software.
Mr. Kleijn added: "The most important thing is that CT drives have good cross-platform compatibility, which makes development easier, and I also get strong support from the CT Drive Center in Rotterdam."