This article is brought to you by Beckhoff Automation provider of advanced and open PC based automation solutions For more information log on to www beckhoff com my Michael Müller right head of special purpose machines sales at Goldfuß and Dieter Völkle Beckhoff sales representative at the Balingen office examine bottle caps due for assembly systems which require that we provision as many as four instances of certain processing stations XTS and its software functions give us enormous flexibility We can use as many movers as we need and we can time how they operate to match the way processes execute New found freedom with XTS Besides exceptional speed XTS provides outstanding flexibility to accommodate differences in the timing of processing stages in which parts are provisioned positioned assembled inspected and ejected and so keep cycle times below one second We wanted to implement a system that we could set up without having to depend on a specific number of processing stations Given the cycle time constraint it was important that we were free to choose components as we wished and could accomplish the flexibility we wanted through the number of movers Michael Müller explains He adds We looked at various workpiece carriers and systems with fixed cycle times However with a fixed cycle carrier you need the same number of systems for all the stations as you do for the bottleneck station if you want to successfully maintain the required cycle time In our case that would have meant using four camera systems four processing stations and four assembly stations This is why we opted for the much more flexible XTS solution instead Injection molded parts for the safety caps are provisioned in bulk via a spiral conveyor and fed into the system where they are inspected by a number of cameras then placed in XTS movers equipped with appropriate mounts The movers transport the caps to processing stations that punch cardboard disks carry out ultrasonic welding and perform various assembly tasks In between the parts are inspected repeatedly at camera stations they are also checked on a weigh scale at the end of the overall process The processing and inspection stations are connected by an oval XTS transport track with a total length of around 7 5 meters made up of 20 straight and eight 45 curved motor modules each 250 millimeters long Roughly 34 movers acting as workpiece carriers travel along the track The entire system is controlled by a C6930 Industrial PC for control cabinet installation PC based control in an open compact end to end system XTS s simple and compact design has distinct benefits as Michael Müller explains The principle advantage of XTS is that the drive and power electronics and the position measurement system are all contained in the motor modules in other words in the actual XTS track Were it not for XTS our assembly line would need somewhere in the region of 200 to 300 motors and the drive control gear would fill a very large cabinet With XTS we need to run just two connecting cables to the control cabinet one for EtherCAT and one for the 24 48 V power supply A C6930 Industrial PC with an Intel CoreTM i7 quad core CPU running TwinCAT software manages the individual movers as servo axes complete with all the usual motion control functions like electronic gearing and camming Due to parallel processing on the multi core CPU the compute power available is far greater than would be the case with sequential processing on a single core making XTS applications like this exceptionally efficient to implement Ph ot o by B ec kh of f

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