We have done several projects for TopAcryl, a Swiss manufacturer of acrylic glass. They use ovens to make customer-specific acrylic glass. For this, the semi-finished product must be heated at different temperatures for different (adjustable) times.
We have upgraded old ovens by adding a local PLC control, and by reading values from these PLCs remotely, graphically displaying, and saving.
It concerned different types of ovens, hot air ovens and ovens with heat exchangers.
Temperatures were read with PT100 RTD.
These temperatures are read by a PC via Profinet and stored in reports.
The PC does this for different PLCs and each PLC again for several ovens.
A self-developed PID control ensures optimum control, in combination with its own autotune algorithm.
For the PC we have developed a Django / Python program for data acquisition and data analysis. With this we can also develop and manage recipes.
