Automatic weighing system upgrade

August 2003 Maintenance, Test & Measurement, Calibration

A steel foundry in northern Italy found it necessary to replace its manually operated iron and coal weighing system with a new, automatic arrangement. The new system was also required to provide some additional features, such as the monitoring of materials used over a period and handle the data interfacing with the supervisory console. It was also required that the new system lend itself to future extensions within the plant.

Although the computing needs of the weighing system are small in themselves, the 'openness' of the required solution imposed special constraints on the system architecture. Due to the presence of moving trays the customer also required the installation of a radio link for use in the different parts of the weighing system.

The system integrator proposed a solution based on the ADAM-5000 Series distributed data acquisition and control modules, (which is available locally from ProMicro) as the core system with two remote units to collect data on the iron and coal scales.

The remote iron scale unit uses an ADAM-4012 analog input module to convert the weight signal from the load cells and is linked with the core system through an ADAM-4550 2,4 GHz radio modem. Another ADAM-4012 is used by the coal scale unit and is directly linked to the core system through an RS485 bus.

Weight display is handled by the core system and indicated on seven-segment displays, and recipe management allows the loading of the coal tray to be driven by the measured load of iron. The core system also handles requests from the supervisor console to change its recipe or transmit operational and statistical data. The weighing system has proven to be reliable and cost effective. The ADAM modules and RS485 bus, together with the radio link, were key elements in creating an open and expandable system - which is now being extended to encompass the entire plant.

For more information contact Elton Prytz, ProMicro, 011 706 7913, [email protected], www.promicro.co.za

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