OG&E Energy Savings Rebate $194,839.27

I earned a $194k rebate from OG&E for my former employer in Yukon, OK.  The project involved the specification and installation of a correctly sized air compressor and dryer.  At the award ceremony I was told that it was the second largest rebate ever awarded in Oklahoma.

Historical trends via Canary Labs and Axiom trending.  The extruder is running great since the retrofit.  Shown in the chart are two independent sources for extruder speed.  Percent current is also displayed which is proportional to extruder pressure.  The characteristic sawtooth wave of the two gravimetric feeders is also shown.  The key metric is melt flow index but the value can only be obtained at twenty minute intervals due to limitations in the lab process.

The PLC-5 in the previous post was converted to an Automation Direct Productivity system.  I prefer to use Allen Bradley but availability issues forced me to choose another vendor or face major delays due to long lead times.

It's hard to believe that a major manufacturing company is still using PLC-5's in 2022 but we were.  I recently upgraded this entire system to a new controller.  The heart of the process is a Werner & Pfleiderer twin screw extruder (400hp).  The DCS also controls a material vacuum convey system with three independent vacuum pumps.  Resin powder is transferred from bags to various hoppers and then to a third floor mixer.  The mixer prepares batches by dosing an additive via a Coriolis meter.  The batch gets mixed with pure resin with two KTron gravimetric feeders then fed to the extruder inlet.  Twelve heated (and water cooled) zones on the extruder manage the temperature of the reaction with independent PID loops.  The finished material gets flattened with nip rolls, solidified on a water cooled belt cooler and turned into powder through a pin mill and hammer mill.  The final step is vacuum conveyed into finish product on RiceLake weigh scales.

Quality Inspection Machine

This machine inspects the quality of an assembly consisting of a plastic frame and a long strand of very thin wire that has been placed in specific slots and tensioned just the right amount with a Fanuc robot.  The final assembly resembles a tiny guitar with four strings on one side and four strings on the other side.  This guitar wouldn't play any interesting songs because all the wires are "tuned" to the same frequency.  The wires are only a few thousands of an inch thick and they have a very thin glass coating that acts like an insulator.  The operation of the machine can be seen in this video, Precision Part Inspection Machine and the corresponding graphical user interface can be viewed here, Precision Part Inspection GUI.

The key elements of the machine are the Keyence optical micrometer and high speed DAQ unit.  The moving parts of the machine are controlled by an AutomationDirect PLC and I created a custom GUI in C# for the operator interface.  The C# GUI interfaces with the PLC and the DAQ unit.  The GUI reads the raw data from the DAQ card and calculates the key parameter which is the frequency of vibration.  The RMS value is also calculated to determine the validity of the measurement.  Daily totals are displayed in a table and data is also stored in an SQL database.

Torit Vacuum Dust Collector Upgraded Controls

Troubleshooting the original system was a nightmare because of the unorganized and dirty cabinet, lack of documentation, and obsolete controls.

System upgraded with Allen Bradley Micrologix 1400 PLC and Red Lion Graphite HMI

 Here is a download link to a Modbus TCP read/write utility that I wrote in Java.

JAVAMODBUSTCP.jar