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Monitoring a Pellet Conveyor
Challenge
A plastic blown-film extrusion company manufactures wrapping products for the meats and cheeses that you find in the supermarket. Over a ½ mile of various conveyor systems are used to carry and mix the pellet medium for the blown film extrusion process.
For the process to run smoothly, it is important that the conveyors run smoothly. The multiple conveyor systems must remain free of blockages and mechanical failures must be detected quickly to reduce costs from wasted material, ruined batches, and costly down time.
With a facility this big and a conveyor system this long, the prospect of running conduit to each monitoring point is a very expensive and daunting proposition. Each monitoring point would need power and some type of signal wire to get the information back to a central monitoring point.
Solution
Acoustic sensors detect if a material blockage or mechanical failure happens at a particular monitoring point along the conveyor system. The sensor output is proportional to the acoustic vibration amplitude of the equipment and can be easily correlated to a voltage level (0 to 10 V dc) that is interpreted as an issue. Banner’s SureCross DX80 Performance Wireless Network brings the numerous monitored voltages as analog inputs to a single data aggregation point where the total system status can be communicated to an HMI, PLC, or SCADA supervisory device.
The DX80 Performance Node monitors the analog value from the acoustic sensor’s output, provides the location from its address within the DX80 Radio Network, and eliminates the need to wire the monitoring sites for power wiring needs because the Node and acoustic sensor can be powered off a battery. The DX80 Performance Gateway collects information from up to 47 Nodes, and communicates via Modbus RTU, which is a universally accepted protocol for most HMI, PLC, and SCADA systems.
Featured Products
Performance Series Industrial Wireless Gateways and Nodes
Create point-to-multi point networks that distribute I/O over large areas. Input and output types include discrete (dry contact, PNP/NPN), analog (0 to 10 V dc, 0 to 20 mA), temperature (thermocouple and RTD), and pulse counter.