Howard Automation

Description

This is a schematic drawing of a control system for the vacuum transfer of plastic pellets in a polymer plant. Here is a 350 Horsepower DC motor and a twin screw extruder gear box. My customer and I built these salvaged components up into a high production polymer extruder. The motor and electrical drive cost about $60k alone! This is the machine nearing completion. It shows the motor drive electrical panel, the main control panel and the touch screen operator interface. The control portion of this job was about $70k in parts and labor. The entire project had a budget of about $400k. I designed, built, wired and installed the electrical controls. This is the back side of the machine showing the side feeders and the weigh belt feeder above the gear box. Here is the main control panel that I designed and built. It uses and OMRON PLC and talks Modbus to the Carotron DC drive. It also uses DeviceNet to talk to the 5 horspower inverter drives and the 16 zones of temperature control. This system controls about 75 kilowatts of heating power in the barrel of the machine.

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