Quality Control

Quality Control & Test Stations

Our latest project involved QC and Test stations. Two of the stations came with Siemens S7-200 series PLC's.
The third one came with a Smart PLC which can be programmed via ladder logic or statement list.
The process has to do with De-Magnetizing shafts on the station below, and then, Magnetizing the same shaft on the second station creating fields that can produce a certain electrical signal used to calibrate meters and sensors.
(Torque). Since it's a unique process, we cannot go into details about it. The machines were built in Austria and found their way here after a couple of years. We had no drawings nor hard copies of the programs and to make things worse, they sat in a warehouse for a couple of months before making their way into the manufacturing facility. The existing programs were lost since the internal batteries of the S7-200 PLC's are good for only a week without power. We recreated the programs from scratch and customized the entire line to work for the new owners.

Once the shaft has been De-Magnetized it is placed on the second station where the CX process takes place.
The shaft is loaded onto a small CNC lathe which is programmed via CNC code to rotate at a certain RPM
range, tool changes and time delays. The CNC controller which can be programmed using STEP 5 code, is
linked to the S7-200 PLC and both run the process for this station. Once the process is finished you get a visible and also audible alarm and also a reading which determines if the shaft has been successfully magnetized or not in order to move to the next station.

Once the shaft has been magnetized , the sensor can now be built. All the electronics and the plastic covers are put together to form a sensor that will be part of a set. A torque Meter with its assigned sensor will be the final product.

Besides the Siemens and smart PC hardware the equipment came with a PC that runs Linux and it is used as a server to generate serial numbers for the sensors. The front end was a Visual Basic Custom application and a scanner was used through the PC's serial port to scan the finished product. We would like to replace all of the PC based setup with a Siemens software package that will insert values into a spread sheet and generate the labels for the finished product in the future. It is the only custom application utilized at the moment, The rest has been converted to standard software that a local integrator can support if need be.

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