The sheet metal working industry is booming. An increasingly wide variety of products, varying batch sizes and strong cost awareness require maximum flexibility in the face of global competition. The scalability and flexibility of PC-based control technology offer significant competitive advantages.
Sheet metal components come in all shapes and sizes, requiring a wide range of machining processes including rolling, cutting, stamping, folding, drawing, joining, cleaning and finishing. Production is based on processing machines, presses, punch presses, machining centres or fully automatic production lines comprising sheet metal working equipment as well as handling devices, storage facilities, automatic material feeding and integration into the company network.
The production systems should be highly productive, precise, reproducible and, of course, cost-effective. This requires optimally adapted processes with minimum stoppage and setup times. The large forces in combination with high velocities, as required for pressing, call for advanced control technology. Manufacturers of production machines demand expandability and flexibility in order to be able to meet customer requirements efficiently and cost-effectively.
The benefits of PC-based control technology, which integrates all processes including control, regulation, motion and HMI on a single PC, have been demonstrated in a wide range of applications in pressing, cutting, bending and welding systems worldwide. The high processor power offered by PC technology eliminates the need for special hardware: position and pressure controllers for hydraulic valves, for example, can be replaced with software. The PC can deal with complex control algorithms and offers additional capacity for other functions such as measuring tasks. Complex and expensive special controllers and hardware PLCs with limited programming flexibility are no longer required.
High performance hardware
Sheet metal working processes have to be fast and precise and offer high repeat accuracy. These are perfect conditions for EtherCAT.
EtherCAT offers full Ethernet compatibility, maximum utilisation of the Ethernet bandwidth, and outstanding realtime characteristics. The benefits of EtherCAT for sheet metal processing systems are, for example, higher speed for punching, stamping or laser treatment, since actuators with exactly defined rate times enable switching with an accuracy of <100 ns and axis movements with maximum reproducibility.
Further benefits are multi-axis motion control with axes synchronised through distributed clocks that have reproducible accuracy in the nanosecond range. This is the type of control required when bending sheet metal where several axes must act in synchronism. Distributed clocks precisely synchronise the EtherCAT devices such as axes, die cushion controllers or synchronism controllers for hydraulic cylinders.
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