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Laminating line boasts better controls

Limitations inherent in a former controls architecture kept RG Engineering from building systems capable of anything more than 600 ft/min. New controls paved the way to 1,000.

PRINT STATIONS. The print section shown here, which has five flexo stations and one gravure station, is identified as in th
PRINT STATIONS. The print section shown here, which has five flexo stations and one gravure station, is identified as in th

Popcorn packed in microwavable bags for in-home consumption is more popular than ever. But without high-speed equipment capable of making those bags efficiently, the price points set by popcorn marketers would be so much higher that it’s unlikely the category would be experiencing its current popularity.

Which brings us to RG Engineering. This Virginia Beach builder of custom converting machinery is putting the finishing touches on a coating and laminating system that applies patches of metallized polyester to a paper substrate and then laminates a second paper substrate on top. The system also handles printing and rewinding. The material that emerges is fed into popcorn bag-making machines by the companies that buy from RG Engineering. Why the metallized polyester patches? Because that’s what causes the corn kernels to pop in the microwave oven.

RG calls its new system the MicroPop 80. Stretching 120 feet and capable of running an 80-inch wide lamination at speeds to 1,000 feet/min, its multiple converting operations (see drawing below) are performed by no less than 63 B&R servo motors and their complementary drives. The motions of all 63 are neatly synchronized over Ethernet Powerlink, a communications protocol that guarantees transfer of time-critical data within very short and precise isochronous cycles with configurable timing. It also synchronizes networked nodes with high precision in the microsecond range.

Also from B&R are six PLCs, one of which runs Windows XP. “That’s the one,” says Isaac Brown of Integrated Motion, the firm that assisted RG Engineering in the controls implementation, “that stores all the various running parameters and coordinates them with the other five. Ethernet Powerlink is what links together all the PLCs so that information on one controller can be shared with another controller. The whole idea is to keep print stations in register with the patching stations where the metallized polyester is laid down on the paper. With Powerlink connecting the two activities, we can have the patchers read the position of the print station just as if they were on the same controller.”

RG Engineering vice president David Ellingsworth says the new controls system was adopted in response to marketplace demand.

Size dictated machine design

“As the machines our customers were ordering got progressively larger and more complex, we knew we needed a new servo control system,” says Ellingsworth. “To accomplish all the coordination, synchronization, and registration we were being asked to deliver, we needed a very stable format. We also needed scalability. With the controls system we were using, we kept bumping into limitations.

“Our previous approach was to have servo controllers spread out across the system. We also had as many as five different programming languages involved. In addition to Microsoft Scripts, there was one for HMI, one for ladder logic, one for the patching systems, and a fifth for some of the drivers we were using. We’d notice that as I/O was scanned and updated, a ‘ghost’ would occasionally get scanned in. In other words, somewhere in the process a noise would get picked up, or maybe one of the processors would send something out when it wasn’t its time to do so. So everything had to be redundant. That slowed down the I/O count, because you had a separate set of software that did nothing but make sure everything was really working the way it was supposed to.

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