“Safe & easy complete solution for packaging machinery”

Pilz equipped the A+F sort packer with a mod­ular, hybrid safety solu­tion con­sisting of a higher-level process con­troller and safety con­troller. In con­junc­tion with the decen­tralised field dis­trib­u­tors PDP67 and the safety locking device PSENslock 2, which was still new at the time of engi­neering, this eco­nom­ical and func­tion­ally coherent safety solu­tion ensures optimum pro­tec­tion in the sort packer pro­duced by the pack­aging machine man­u­fac­turer. At the same time it has reduced the amount of wiring required and also cre­ated valu­able space in the con­trol cab­inet. The aspect of Secu­rity was another focus of the Safety solu­tion for A+F: as a hybrid safety con­cept, the cur­rent solu­tion enhances Secu­rity by making manip­u­la­tion and unau­tho­rised data access more dif­fi­cult.

Flexibility and sophisticated safety concepts…

Oper­a­tors, including A+F cus­tomers, expect their pack­aging sys­tems not only to have high cycle rates, but also to be highly reli­able. As pack­aging some­times changes or a plant has to per­form dif­ferent tasks, max­imum flex­i­bility and cost-effec­tive­ness are also required. How­ever, high cycle rates com­bined with max­imum flex­i­bility demand sophis­ti­cated safety con­cepts in order to sat­isfy these require­ments. This is because per­sonnel must be able to operate what is usu­ally highly auto­mated machinery in safety, plus they must have effec­tive pro­tec­tion against the risk of injury, when spon­ta­neously reaching into open­ings or during set­ting oper­a­tions, for example. It is essen­tial that oper­ability and pro­duc­tivity are user-friendly and effi­cient.

This is one of the main rea­sons why mod­ular, easy-to-use Safety and Indus­trial Secu­rity solu­tions have always been very impor­tant to A+F. For many years, they have enjoyed a close, col­lab­o­ra­tive part­ner­ship with Pilz, as the expert in safe automa­tion. “The holistic solu­tions and expert advice from Pilz not only make our sys­tems par­tic­u­larly safe, but also easy to operate and con­vert. And there­fore more com­pet­i­tive overall”, says Michael von Zmuda, Head of Engi­neering at A+F Automa­tion und Fördertechnik GmbH. He con­tinues: “With a strong rep­u­ta­tion in the pack­aging industry and world­wide sup­port, Pilz is our cus­tomers’ pre­ferred sup­plier for Safety and Secu­rity.”

… and a trustful partnership for safe systems

As tech­nology has pro­gressed, the require­ments for effi­cient and intel­li­gent safety solu­tions at A+F have also increased. Safety updates always lead to pro­duc­tivity and effi­ciency gains, as well as fur­ther reduc­tions in down­times. That’s why the far more flex­ible, pow­erful, safe and con­fig­urable small con­troller PNOZ­multi 2 from Pilz is now used in A+F’s sys­tems – after the proven PNOZ­multi Classic had reli­ably ensured the safety of A+F’s machines for many years. This enabled the pack­aging machine man­u­fac­turer to con­sis­tently pro­vide its cus­tomers with state-of-the-art machines in terms of pro­duc­tivity, effi­ciency and fur­ther reduced down­times. The same applied to the sort packer: the mod­ular machine typ­i­cally had feed and removal aper­tures, card­board and blanks mag­a­zines as well as gates and covers, which had to be secured using appro­priate pro­tec­tive devices.

Process workflows via safe sensor technology are efficient

In detail, intel­li­gent sensor and light cur­tain solu­tions on the infeed and out­feed points, as well as on the main­te­nance gates, reli­ably pro­tect oper­ating per­sonnel from trap­ping their fin­gers or even hands. The Pilz safety locking device PSENslock 2 secures a total of twelve gates on the A+F machine with a locking force of 1000 N each. The focus here is on pro­tecting the system from improper access and avoid­able system down­times. If access is actu­ally required, the oper­ator requests access via a dis­play. The “Flex­pickers” then move to their home posi­tion. Only then can the gates be opened. This saves time because the system does not have to be labo­ri­ously moved back to the start posi­tion, making the process work­flow more effi­cient.

The wiring here is also effi­cient: the respec­tive safety locking device PSENslock 2 was con­nected directly to the safe decen­tralised input mod­ules-field dis­trib­utor PDP67 via plug & play, using pre-assem­bled cables. A PDP link module – a com­mu­ni­ca­tion module for the field dis­trib­u­tors – con­nected to the PNOZ­multi 2 processes up to four field dis­trib­u­tors in one line. Ergo: The repack­aging system actu­ally only needs one cable from the con­trol cab­inet to con­trol and eval­uate 16 PSENslock 2s.

The pre-assem­bled Pilz cables sup­port the plug-and-play con­cept and help to shorten instal­la­tion and com­mis­sioning times. For example, PNOZ­multi 2 also processes the sig­nals from the TÜV-cer­ti­fied solu­tion for mon­i­toring the card­board blanks on the Flex­picker.

Why modular? – Only pay for what you need!

The safety solu­tion around the sort packer scores highly with effi­cient diag­nostic man­age­ment: the soft­ware logic in the PNOZ­multi 2 eval­u­ates which gate is cur­rently “open/locked” or which emer­gency stop is acti­vated. The Pilz diag­nostic system PVIS sup­ports the system oper­ator with diag­nostic mes­sages, which appear in the con­trol cab­inet as plain text on the device dis­play of the safe small con­troller. So oper­ating per­sonnel can recover errors quickly, con­tributing to more pro­duc­tive processes. And with the soft­ware tool PNOZ­multi Con­fig­u­rator, safety cir­cuits can be con­fig­ured intu­itively using pre-con­fig­ured blocks and func­tions. Changes to the con­fig­u­ra­tion are always pos­sible if needed. What’s more, they can be traced at any time using the check sum stored in the pro­gram – in the PNOZ­multi: CRC check sum. So Pilz’s small con­troller sup­ports A+F’s phi­los­ophy of max­imum flex­i­bility com­bined with highest effi­ciency!

Customer solution with maximum adaptability

The hybrid struc­ture of this chosen safety solu­tion is of cen­tral impor­tance for A+F: as a system man­u­fac­turer, A+F and its cus­tomers, i.e. oper­a­tors, can change process para­me­ters at any time or restart the process con­troller, for example – the safety con­troller is unaf­fected. Michael von Zmuda sum­marises it like this: “Actu­ally, Pilz is the only place we have found such a con­vincing, flex­ible, safe & easy com­plete solu­tion, which per­fectly com­bines safety, con­fig­u­ra­tion and usability, as well as diag­nos­tics and cabling!”