July 2003Motion Control & Drives
Products & Solutions
Shatterprufe, the leading manufacturer of automotive safety glass in South Africa, imported a glass-toughening furnace for its plant in GaRankuwa, north of Rosslyn from the USA in 1991.
The glass toughening process involves cooling the glass down rapidly after the bending process. Two large fans, each driven by two 750 kW AC motors in a master-slave configuration, are used to uniformly cool down the bent glass from the upper and lower surfaces. Each fan can produce an air pressure of 95" water column at 1200 m above sea level.
To control the fracture (toughening quality) of the glass, one needs to consider two factors:
* The cool-down rate (air pressure) needs to vary from glass to glass.
* One needs to compensate for ambient changes such as time of day and the season.
The furnace was supplied with variable speed drives. After some years' of service the drives would regularly trip and they struggled to start the fans once they had been switched off.
Each time a drive trips, anything from 20 to 40 pieces of glass are lost because they have not been adequately toughened. Spare parts and service were very expensive as there were no agents for the drives in South Africa. The drives also generated a lot of heat that affected the overall working conditions around the furnace.
Shatterprufe has standardised on Allen Bradley control equipment since 1993 and approached Rockwell Automation South Africa to look at the problems associated with the outdated drives. Rockwell Automation supplied, installed and integrated four new Reliance 750 kW water-cooled AC drives with a chilled water plant, as a turnkey project at an affordable price. The drives and chilled water plant are connected via ControlNet to the existing Allen Bradley PLC5 system. The changeover took three weeks and was performed during Shatterprufe's annual shutdown in December 2001. The Reliance drives have been running since start-up last year with minimal problems and downtime.
For more information contact Johan van Vuuren, Rockwell Automation, 011 654 9700.
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