LASER SERVO POSITIONING

JUPITER received a new ‘never been done before’ request for laser positioning, in aiding the positioning of fiber glass for wind mill blades. These fiber glass sheets have to be positioned at precise positions and stacked over one another to get the desired shape of the wind mill blades when they are heated and infused. Till date this operation was done manually, by using measuring tape, for 125 positions. This was a really time consuming process, as well as accurate results were never reached.

So the solution provided included a laser line head mounted on top, while position is controlled via a 200W servo motor. All the 125 positions were recorded in the HMI recipe, which can be changed by the operator. The system runs through each of the positions, aiding the operator to keep the fiber glass sheet in position, before acknowledging to move to the next position. By this system all the sheets are in position and accurate because of the use of servo positioning, also the time consumed is drastically reduced.

The control system uses a basic Siemens S7 1200 series PLC along with Simatic KTP 400 basic HMI. The servo drive used for this system is the new Sinamics V90 Profinet series. This servo drive used a new technology introduced by Siemens earlier this year, where the drive positioning is done through TCP/IP communication rather than the traditional pulse and direction physical outputs from the PLC. The use of comms for positioning in the servo drive, eliminates the errors caused by loss of pulses in noise while running through wires. Also the only wire that connects the PLC and the servo drive is the Ethernet cable, so wiring is reduced in the panel also no complicated soldering process for 50pin connectors along with multicore cables. Hence this new technology is highly efficient, faster, less wiring and the list goes on. All the components were housed in a IP54 rated Rittal enclosure.

This new prototype was commissioned onsite and the customer was really happy and placed an immediate order for two more systems. The working photos on site could not be posted here for security reasons from the end user.