Redesign of control system for automatic batch weigher

The batch weighing system consisted of four weigh stations each with a number of feeders, sixteen in total. A motorised trolley carried a weigh bin between the stations. The system had originally been installed using a PC running Pascal as the control device.

Despite numerous attempts, the supplier of the system was unable to achieve the performance targets for both speed and accuracy. The PC was replaced with a Mitsubishi PLC and an MMI package on a new PC. The cycle time was almost halved and accuracy improved. Further benefits were that data could be archived and the fault diagnostics were greatly improved.

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