Simulation

Hi I have done a small project with 4 motors and pumps, filling the different chemicals and taking the mixture out. The system is working in Modbus (Click PLC). If I want to simulate the process using a small pump and motor how can I do it? I am looking for non industrial-grade training purpose demo products to integrate with the project and simulate? The region I am looking is UK please advise

Most simulations are done without any hardware like pumps etc. I often do this, I create a separate block of code that simulates filling & emptying tanks, so for example, to simulate analog levels or weigh cells, when a pump runs it decrements one tank level variable whilst incrementing another. however, if you want to do a real life simulation then I suggest you take a look at Amazon, they have plenty of small pumps with 12 to 240v of various descriptions, plastic containers, sensors it's surprising what you can get at reasonable cost. I recently did a simulation of a conveyor with a couple of sensors a motor and other various bits all from amazon, however, one thing I could not get was the old style metal Meccano, but my son came to the rescue with a set I bought for him many years ago we built a conveyor that was almost 2 metres long totally out of it using some old pond liner as the belt.

parky said:

if you want to do a real life simulation then I suggest you take a look at Amazon,

Click to expand...

I would add eBay to the list to look into as well. Plenty of times there's second hand equipment being sold there that is still usable or usually adding Arduino to the search term may give you results that you can use for real life simulation on your bench (though you may need a few relays and a 12V or smaller supply).

What do you mean by "working in Modbus?" Is Modbus how the PLC communicates to the motors and/or sensors?


Unless this is for training the instrumentation techs, I would go for a software simulation e.g. an AdvancedHMI app (e.g. see here) or Python on a RaspberryPI could probably emulate all sensors, controls, tanks, Modbus comms, etc. It is neither a huge nor an insignificant effort to write a bespoke simulation from scratch, and I expect it would take about as long for someone with coding chops to do it in software as it would for someone with instrumentation chops to do it with hardware.