Improving a manual process with PAC

摘要

Sam Hammond of Innoventor Solutions, discusses the benefits of choosing a PAC solution to integrate motion, vision and digital I/O for a custom built labelling machine. Innoventor Solutions is a producer of custom designs and hardware for plant modernisation, process I improvement, critical process control, testing and verification, and specialty equipment. It recently used the PXI platform as a Programmable Automation Controller (PAC) to create a packaging automation system for the beverage industry. Previously, the customer had installed labels on the beverage cans by hand and sorted them manually. This created a production bottleneck and increased the risk of motion injuries for employees. The per-piece average cycle time for the new system had to be 1.4 seconds. Since the labels on the cans have more than 150 possible colour schemes and background patterns, an additional challenge was finding and reading the bar code on each can.