Product category:
Positioners, servo drives
News Release from: Baldor UK | Subject: Baldor H2 family
Edited by the Processingtalk Editorial
Team on 16 November 2006
Smart drives simplify cable winding
automation
A smart AC motor drive from the Baldor H2 family has allowed Centrilift Cable to eliminate a PLC, and improve the productivity of winding finished cable onto drums, at its facility in Oklahoma
A smart AC motor drive from the Baldor H2 family has allowed Centrilift Cable to eliminate a PLC, and improve the productivity of winding finished cable onto drums, at its facility in Claremore, Oklahoma Centrilift Cable makes specialised cabling for the electrical submersible pumping systems used in oil and gas wells
This article was originally published on Processingtalk on 26 Mar 2003 at 8.00am (UK)
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The finished cable is wound directly onto a large drum as it is fed from the manufacturing line with its wire drawing, coating and spooling machinery.
This operation was controlled by a PLC sending 0-to-10V control signals to two 'dumb' AC motor drives: one to control the drum rotation, and one to control the traversing motion.
However, before each winding process, the operator first had to make manual calculations using charts and tabular data, to feed into the PLC programme, in order to account for the particular cable size and feeding speed.
Centrilift decided to review the process to see if efficiency could be improved.
Harold Eastin of Centrilift, and Matt Asbill of automation supplier Motion Industries, decided to simplify the winding system by taking advantage of an electronic gearing feature in the Baldor intelligent H2 AC motor drive, which can act as a small machine and motion control system.
This ratio function allows the two drives in this application to synchronise automatically, based simply on input of the cable size using the drive's integral keypad and display.
The traversing drive simply takes the drum rotation speed from the first drive, and automatically calculates the gearing ratio needed to produce uniform spooling.
The first drive also uses its built-in intelligence to dynamically manage the spooling process, adjusting speed according to a voltage level taken from a potentiometer on the 'dancer arm' that tensions the cable as it is fed.
The winding process tends to start slowly, and then speed up.
As the dancer arm signal changes, the drive alters its speed accordingly, with the traversing drive following in synchronisation.
According to Harold Eastin of Centrilift, "Using two smart drives in tandem has allowed us eliminate the PLC and the manual programming steps, and do away with a lot of signal wiring as well".
Matt Asbill of Motion Industries, who did the installation and set-up added, "On automation improvement projects we are typically installing PLCs and throwing away relays.
In this case we removed both.
With this installation, Centrilift Cable is seeing better than a 25% increase in productivity, simply by exploiting the intelligence built into the H2 drive".
Bill Hunt, a drives specialist with the Baldor regional office in Tulsa commented, "We usually think of adding more intelligence by using touch screens and PLCs, but in this case that just added difficulty.
At Centrilift, we used Baldor drive technology to do the ratio function required in this application". Request a free brochure from Baldor UK ...
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