Steel wire calendering rubber bank control

[beauedgar89]

I work on a 4 roll steel wire calender for a tire company. I have tasked with trying to automate the rubber supply bank for the upper and lower supply. Does anyone have any experience with this? We use Studio 5000 V34 and can run up to 67 m/min. Our tissue thickness can vary greatly depending on the recipe we are running so the control would have to be adjustable and dynamic. Any help or ideas would be great.

 

[OkiePC]

My memories of the rubber ranch tell me that this is a task that probably should not be automated. The calendar lines I worked on had a rubber bank managed by the operator by making adjustments to the width of the feed strip.


Maybe you could use a vision system and sophisticated software to calculate, and an actuator to move the strip knife, but a good operator would still do a better job with a whole lot less heartache.

The steel fabric calendar in the plant where I worked could create a shedload of waste if that rubber bank went empty or a fockton of downtime if the fabric broke.

 

[beauedgar89]

Thanks for the reply. I do have some IFM O3D302 3D Vision Sensors I am experimenting with that may give some help. Our biggest issue right now is we have so many new operators that don't know how to effectively control the rubber and management's answer is always to try to take them out of the picture instead of training them.