Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) Dürr South Africa, have chosen Adroit Technologies as their preferred Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (scada) supplier for paint test lab automation. Michael Broek, managing director for Dürr South Africa comments, “The reason for choosing Adroit was two-fold. The Adroit package has an excellent cost advantage with respect to tag count and functionality. Secondly, the Adroit scada implementation time to meet the stringent technical requirements of our paint test lab automation was relatively short. This provided a cost benefit to our client and freed up our engineers much sooner than expected. As a whole, Adroit has given us strong technical and sales support for this and other projects.”
Dürr South Africa forms part of the larger Dürr AG group based in Stuttgart, Germany. Dürr is a market and technology leader in the design and installation paint application equipment and specialises in complete paint shop solutions for automobile manufacturers and their component suppliers.
The standalone Adroit scada installed at Dürr South Africa's paint test lab installation runs on Windows 2000 and is set up to simulate each individual customers vehicle paint requirements. The recipes are stored in an Access database and use a maximum of four steps per recipe, which are programmed using extensive Visual Basic scripting.
The paint test lab is equipped with paint machines similar to those used in the OEM car plants. These paint machines carry different paint application equipment and are utilised to simulate the painting process in each of the OEM factories. In this way quality assurance test and new paint trials can be executed. This unmanned process is controlled and monitored from primer and base coat application to the final clear coat application, and adhering to all flush-off and cleaning requirements. In this way all permutations of the manufacturers operations process can be executed by the scada system in conjunction with the facility automation.
The scada controls and monitors spray parameters according to individual recipes stored in the database including line speeds, temperatures, humidity, shaping air, paint volume, high voltage control and the bell speed. All of these affect the transfer efficiency of paint to the test panel and the application quality thereof. In this fashion, Dürr is able to provide clients with a highly customised batch manufacturing system. It has been designed to be easily expandable and to be able to efficiently control complex processes. Adroit provides increased data throughput and program responsiveness for logging information to Dürr's extensive database.
In addition to facilitating the downloading of process parameters to Dürr's various front-end devices, automating routine tasks and constructing process simulations, the recipes in Adroit have the built-in capability to react to unexpected process deviations by executing process-related conditional branching instructions, ensuring a high degree of process safety.
For a paint lab facility, Dürr South Africa required accurate and expedient data logging, which the Adroit system provides on a per second basis. Each batch is assigned a unique identity and records every aspect of the process. The Adroit scada provides user configurable viewing using easy to apply filtering criteria, and the statistical agent automatically calculates the minimum, maximum, average, standard deviation, total and rate of change for designated input tags. These records are provided to clients, such as Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler and BMW, as part of the finished product. Adroit provides a complete trending package with built-in capacity for trending up to eight variables per trend window and functionality to scroll from real-time to historical data using a keyboard or mouse.
For the test facility, Dürr has no redundancy system. Based on the underlying Windows NT event system, Adroit provides a secure audit trail of all operator actions, alarm and system events. The Adroit scada is interfaced to a Siemens S7-314 PLC with OPC servers using a CP5613 communications card. Data is logged in an Access database on the SQL Server.
Only a limited depiction of the facility was required as it is largely an unmanned process. The company used the standard Adroit wizards to create concise process vector graphic representation of the plant's two paint reciprocators and various atomisers and paint guns.
Dürr plans for further enhancements to the system include integrating onto the Internet to provide management with an overview of the site and increasing the size of their scada model to encompass more of the plants operations.
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