Automotive gaskets under control

In order to meet a more and more stringent demand from the automotive industry, Friul Filiere has developed a special plant for the production of coextruded and reinforced gasket profiles. This plant features a continuous and accurate inline control of the production with user-friendly characteristics. The complete project consists in several extruders with an automatic multiple feeding system of the various thermoplastic materials, a metal inserting device and a flock tape coextrusion unit. Only the automatic control system can face this level of complexity and manage so many process variables keeping constant the set parameters. The supervisor, heart of the system, operates all the units connected and allows: setting the production parameters of each profile; monitoring each step of the process; controlling the daily production process; reporting all the events during the process; reloading the historical data of the production; self-diagnosing the possible breakdowns; remote-servicing for technical assistance.
More in details, the system enables the setting and recalling of the production recipes to control the process data and the related parameters, their measurement and recording in real time. The supervisor stores all the historical records and the customized data related to the production batches for each product, displayed also with graphical representations. The human machine interface has been extremely simplified and the supervision system of the plant is remotely reachable on different operational levels. The different pages of the software enable the operator an easy access to the most significant process variables for each single machine, to all the data of the synchronized machines, to all the parameters regarding each unit, and to control and verify energy consumption, produced parts, and production parameters. Furthermore the supervisor is able to perform a self-diagnosis of the faults, to report them and to analyze the causes, indicating where to intervene and allowing a quick restarting of the process.