Lenze – AC Tech has worked closely with a specialist ultrasonic engineering company to solve the problem of making the perfect sliced sausage quickly and with minimal waste. A traditional cured continental sausage is difficult to cut very finely in an automated process because of the adhesive qualities of the meat, when a slice is made with a normal blade it tends to stick to the blade surface after the cut is complete.

The ultrasonic company, more used to sieving and sorting fine powders than chopping sausages has applied it’s high frequency vibration technology to ensure the slices drop away from the blade neatly into the correct place each time. The challenge was to integrate this high-end technology into a slicing machine and still meet the low-cost demands of the food processing industry.

The solution was simple, using a 4 amp PositionServo 940 with encoder feedback to control the position of the blade; the knife could be reciprocated in minimal time and with maximum speed and accuracy. Driving through a precise Lenze MCS servo motor and gearbox combination and a cogged belt drive, the thickness of the slices can be controlled along the entire length of the sausage.

The PositionServo is controlled via a Lenze drive PLC unit and an HMI, in this case a 4” Lenze LCD grey scale touchscreen display. By using an smd drive to power the conventional AC motor that actuates the blade, the machine can be operated with domestic 110 – 240 V supply and still supply a super cost effective combination. Using CANopen to link all the machine control components also allowed minimal wiring to be used and resulted in a highly compact machine that is easy to program and very easy to use.

Features:

Integrated servo, inverter, gearbox

and HMI solution

Complete component compatibility

High speed accurate position control

Precise automation within a low budget

CANopen compatibility

Easy to use

In this particular case, however, all of the documentation was written in the Swedish language. The drive itself had extensive documentation in the form of manuals that were written in English, but there were no actual machine documents written in English.

The customer had taken the liberty to do a good chunk of translation regarding the essential documents, but as you know, even documentation written in the English language can be hard to understand if you weren’t one of the original engineers.

On projects such as these, I typically like to spend a day or two with my head completely in the program – in this case with the Google Translator at my side. The two most fundamental aspects I was looking for? The homing sequence and the foam gun sequence (as they desired changes to the way the gun operates).

This is the order of operations I took, and it may help some of you out in the future:

1. Gather all of the documentation specific to the job.
2. Gather the requirements of what the customer desires and write them down.
3. Gather all of the tools that will help you break the language barrier (human translators or robot ones)
4. Dig out the I/O list if it is included in the documentation (if it is not, build the list yourself manually)
5. Translate that list to the proper language
6. Cross reference your I/O list to your documentation to seek out a homing sequence in the program
7. Use this as your starting point, as your homing sequence is typically the building block of your program.
8. Next, target the section of the program (referencing the I/O related to it) the customer wants changes too or is having issue with.

This is an excellent starting point for any troubleshooting of PLCs or Motion Controllers outside of your language barrier.  After two days of research and properly building my own documentation – I was able to get the machine running (not without headaches of course) in about one 8 hour day.

Even though the documentation was in a completely different language, this job would have taken weeks had there been no documentation at all – this truly is a testament to the importance of having documentations for your systems – even if that documentation is in a completely different language.

Craig Chamberlin