Industrial PC brings controls benefits to high-speed tray former/sealer

摘要

Introduced recently at the Worldwide Food Expo in Chicago, the Model R 535 thermoforming machine from Multivac forms and seals trays of food and other products at speeds to 600 packs/min. It's equipped with a Beckhoff CX1020 DIN rail-mounted embedded PC that centralizes control by handling PLC, motion control, and HMI functions in a single device. The industrial PC controller provides a direct backplane con-rnnection to Beckhoff I/O terminals, which in Multivac's case are networked via Ethernet as the system's fieldbus. According to Multivac's Michael Krieger, this represents a significant controls improvement.rn"We used to use a proprietary system more or less tailored for us," says Krieger.