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Taking control for greater competitiveness

06 February 2023

Richard Allen explains what controllers can do to drive the competitiveness of food and beverage manufacturers.

Industrial automation technologies are becoming increasingly accessible to food and drink manufacturers of all sizes, including smaller enterprises as economical and intuitive solutions are creating more responsive and agile production lines that can adapt to emerging industry trends. 

As more advanced automated systems populate the shop floor, machine controllers play a central role in how operators run and interact with key processes, as well as how they optimise productivity and quality.

Food and beverage producers are confronting a landscape that is increasingly more competitive, but which also offer exciting opportunities for those adopting digital technologies. 

Looking closer at the most pressing issues for the industry, it is clear that data-driven applications are key. Advanced analytics capabilities, for example, can enhance process and quality control, troubleshooting and traceability. Additionally, improving energy efficiency, overall asset effectiveness and performance are all key requirements. Well-designed, data-crunching industrial automation solutions can offer a flexible, futureproof platform to scale up capabilities over time.

The backbone of an effective smart manufacturing application that is able to achieve this is the control system, which plays a key role in determining the level of reliability, responsiveness and overall performance of the entire setup. Ultimately, controllers can be connected to every manufacturing process so it is crucial to utilise a solution that can successfully run a production line while also offering forward-looking functionalities.

A common requirement within food and beverage production facilities is the real-time control of process conditions to ensure product quality, short cycle times and energy efficiency. This was the case for Lancashire-based Dewlay Cheesemakers.

The cheese producer implemented an automated control system to help control its multiple cheese vats using a PLC supplied by Mitsubishi. This PLC is helping deliver accurate actionable insights in real-time, giving the ability to modify the curd production process to obtain cheeses of consistent, high quality. The control system is ensuring flexible operation and simple process tracking and has allowed the cheesemaker to expand by increasing the number of cheese vats that can be monitored as well as the number of possible recipes in use. Existing products can be produced more efficiently, alongside perfecting new ones that can then be added to the overall production schedule.

A slice of automation
Other setups, often involving mechatronics and other robotic solutions, tend to require high positional accuracy, elevated speed or a combination of these aspects.

For example, when Western Mechanical Handling (WMH) wanted to serve the market with an innovative industrial continuous food cutting machine that could slice products of any shape and size, it needed a dependable position tracking system. More precisely, the system required repeatable positional accuracy to offer unprecedented high-quality and high-speed cutting, ensuring the blade would slice the entire product and stop just before reaching the tray.

This was delivered by combining Mitsubishi Electric’s six- axis robots, equipped with ultrasonic blades, with a PLC. In effect, the solution can repeatedly position itself correctly with an accuracy of 20 µm.

In many other food industry applications, deterministic, high-speed communications are fundamental. These support the real-time sharing of data to generate valuable insights to control and adjust operations as well as flag anomalies and streamline troubleshooting. As a result, companies can drive productivity and efficiency while also minimising downtime.

As the volume of data generated increases to support smart operations, many food and beverage producers are looking at solutions that are compatible with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) to drive future-oriented deterministic data transfers and convergence. The need for transparency and data sharing across the enterprise is also one of the reasons behind another tendency that characterises many applications in the sector. More specifically, the preference towards solutions that are easy to use and to maintain is extremely common, as it streamlines and simplifies interactions between automated systems and operators across the company.

Richard Allen is OEM Solutions & Services Manager at Mitsubishi Electric.


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