MACHINE BUILDING, FRAMEWORKS & SAFETY FEATURE HMI takes the
heat in furnace design
Needing a new HMI, furnace manufacturer Northern
Combustion
Systems turned to Siemens for the
solution. Martin Brown, product manager at
Siemens, looks into the
challenges faced W
hen Northern Combustion Systems (NCS) needed a human-machine interface (HMI) for the new control system of its walking beam furnace, it was essential that the solution
could withstand the hostile production environment it would be used in. However, with the team working on heat treatments needing to wear protective gloves for the duration of a shift, modern HMI touchscreens were deemed unworkable. In addition to this, the new system had to give workers complete 360˚ mobility so they could raise and lower the beam furnace as well as move it back and forth, and open and close its door. Following a consultation with industrial automation & control specialist, Underwoods, a remote
push button station based on Siemens ACT with PROFINET emerged as the most suitable system for the conditions. Not only was the installation process quick, but the solution was also robust and durable with the highest ingress protection (IP) rating against dust, dirt and moisture.
DESIGNING THE SOLUTION When designing the system, the location of the pushbutton station was to be sited some distance from the programmable logic controller (PLC). Civil works for running underground cables also had to be avoided. PROFINET is the leading Industrial Ethernet standard for automation, with its openness and flexibility giving users optimum freedom when designing machine and system structures. Besides standard wiring, push buttons and signalling, devices can be connected directly to the controller in the field or cabinet via PROFINET, AS-Interface and IO-Link. This way, wiring time is reduced and error sources can be minimised, allowing more flexibility if future modifications are required. In NCS
CS’ case, just one cable ran from pushbuttons wired from the gateway. The station featured 14 buttons including an e-stop failsafe switch. A couple of the devices
had additional inputs and outputs with two of the digital inputs for limit switches on doors that, without the IO, would have needed to be wired back to the panel. A potentiometer was also wired into an analogue input as a speed control on some pumps. The solution delivered the potential for up to 21 signalling devices and for the pushbuttons and
e-stop to be connected to Siemens’ Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) portal. The TIA portal provided instant feedback on cable faults with accurate diagnosis for fast resolution. Tagging the system was simple and permitted the movement of buttons without rewiring as buttons were re-tagged within software. Siemens ET200 failsafe central processing unit (CPU) automatically triggered a failsafe warning in the event of a connection loss.
SAVING COST AND TIME The build-time for the controller came in at 2-2.5 hours, including time to cut holes for the pushbuttons and wire the controller using a flat ribbon cable between devices. For the same number of pushbuttons using a different set-up, a minimum of 35-core multicore cables, a screened cable for the potentiometer, terminals, cables, ferrels, numbers, additional digital 16-way IO, and an analogue card would have been used. Siemens’ solution delivered an overall cost saving of approximately 50%. In the future, NCS plans to use Sirius ACT with PROFINET wirelessly and looks forward to
discovering other innovative solutions for its specialised manufacturing work in the most demanding of environments.
Siemens
https://new.siemens.com/uk/
en.html DESIGN SOLUTIONS | OCTOBER 2020 13 om the PL PLC to the PR PROFINET ga gateway, with the
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
