A leading manufacturer of food and beverage packaging systems, SIG Combibloc recently redesigned the HMI component in one series of its line of filling machines. The firm selected B&R as the hardware supplier and is using B&R’s combination of a 19” HMI panel and an industrial PC.
“At the time of the evaluation, not only did B&R have a completely integrated display with the large dimensions we were looking for, they also had a very impressive amount of experience and the capability to innovate very quickly,” says Peter Holzkamper, who is responsible for visualization systems at SIG Combibloc.
The B&R display fits into an extremely slender housing. Thanks to a swing-arm, it can be moved by the user into the optimal reading position.
“B&R modified a standard display to match our requirements. This further increased the user friendliness and functionality of our HMI,” adds Holzkamper.
He also gives a positive review of the industrial PC used in SIG Combibloc’s new user interface. “The APC620 from B&R is extremely compact and definitely lives up to the title ‘Industrial PC.’”
Holzkamper was also impressed with B&R’s in-house industrial PC assembly, including the ability to develop and produce custom boards. “The whole package just works for us,” says Holzkamper. “And the B&R computers have long-term availability of over 10 years. This really set them apart.”
The industrial PC in this case runs a visualization application based on the Zenon HMI/SCADA software from Copa-Data, which was developed together with industrial design expert Thomas Hofmann. “In addition to reliability, we placed special emphasis on the user-friendliness of the human machine interface,” explains Holzkamper. “This is why we brought Dr. Hoffman as a design and usability expert. The cooperation was clearly fruitful. The logical menu structure, the graphic implementation, and the user-friendliness of the communication platform were all oriented around the user’s habits.”
SIG Combibloc’s next step is to integrate the new HMI into other machine series it builds. The firm now has a standard interface that optimally matches the requirements of a filling machine and its operators. “However, the entire packaging line is composed of multiple machines,” says Holzkamper. The machines that come before and after the filling machine perform less complex tasks, and therefore do not require the numerous functions and display options provided by the SIG Combibloc standard interface.
“That would be like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut,” says Holzkamper. “We therefore decided to develop an entire HMI kit that covers all the various requirements of the machines that make up the line.”
Toward that end, SIG Combibloc designed an operator terminal based on the B&R X20 System with three illiuminated ring keys to cover the lower end of the HMI system.
