Metal Processing - providing accurate solutions in harsh environments

Our customer manufactures coil processing, tension leveling, colour coating, cutters, slitters and coil packaging machines for the metal processing industry. The company has over 65 years’ experience and exports worldwide. 

 We historically have supplied this customer with our shaft mounted hand wheel position indicators with either analogue or digital forms of indication depending upon the application so they were aware of our technical expertise in the application of our products to allow axes to be positioned accurately and efficiently.

 The requirement was to automate the adjustments away from manual operation. For their new application they needed a compact solution which would be resistant to adverse environments, highly accurate with high shock resistance. They also had to ensure that the position would not be lost when the machines power was down and it must have Profibus communication to interface to the proposed controller.

 The solution was to supply the compact sensor MSA111C which has an extremely compact footprint of only 70x 30x 14 mm and is used in combination with the absolutely coded tape MBA111 at only 10mm wide. Output signal uses the Sikonetz RS485 protocol and then is converted externally to Profibus Communication. The sensor system is completely absolute so the datum position will not be lost even if movement takes place on power down. Protection is to IP67 to allow reliable and maintenance free operation in this extreme environment. The resolution was to the requested 0.001 mm with accuracy across the 1 metre travel to +/- 0.01 mm.

 This solution opened a new market for the client to allow them to retrofit this extremely compact product to existing machinery with very minimal mechanical alteration, giving them a very robust, accurate and efficient solution to allow the multi-axes machines to be adjusted. Our client’s customers benefit from the faster automated setting reducing wastage and setup times and therefore of course saving money!

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