Development of PLC Based Control System for Automatic Shearing Machine

Our everyday life comprises of an endless list of commodities and products which are made up of metal or metallic components. Metal is used in a wide range application from house wiring to the transport facilities that we use every day. Of all these day-to-day goods, the use of metallic sheets is proportionally high. The examples of their use include our kitchens, bathrooms, drawing rooms, study rooms, furniture, decoration, doors etc. To mold these sheets as per the requirement of the individual product requires skill and to put this skill to use, some machinery is required. There is a wide range of machinery used to mold these materials; change their shape, dimensions, surface finish etc. In order to put them through these changes, they are required to be cut to the exact dimensions as per application. A Shearing Machine is used for this purpose. The machine is a mechanical arrangement so as to provide mechanical advantage and reduce effort of the operator in cutting the sheets. Adjusting the machine for cutting a particular thickness of sheet is a tedious task and prone to error which results in job defects. So, a solution is required to overcome this issue. We hereby propose to build a PLC Based Control System for such an Automatic Shearing Machine. Use of PC based automation is not required for this application as it do not require intense calculations and complexity. So, we suggest going for PLC based automation for the same. This will reduce the number of control components thus reducing the data interaction time. After implementation, the results obtained are – the cycle time of the entire process is reduced; the system boots in 14 seconds, setting time is as low as 4 seconds and as high as 6 seconds as compared to 12 seconds in the earlier configuration. The HMI has been provided with the functions useful for the current configuration of the machine and thus is more acceptable to the operator as it creates lesser confusion. The cost of the new control components configuration is 40.56% of the cost of previous configuration.