Siemens at glasstec 2006

With Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) and Totally Integrated Power (TIP), this offering for the glass industry contains an integrated range of products and systems for automation and power supply, supplemented by a comprehensive range of services. This year coincides with 150 years of Siemens tradition and innovation in the glass industry: In 1856, Hans Siemens, a brother of Werner von Siemens, founded a glass factory in Dresden. With its present range of solutions covering the entire plant life cycle, Siemens helps its customers in the glass industry to save energy, exploit resources efficiently, and respond flexibly to market requirements.

At the glasstec, Siemens will present the integrated automation of all stages in glassmaking and processing, based on TIA. This covers individual machining units for cutting tables, grinding machines and drilling machines, as well as complete production lines for automobile glass, construction glass and hollow glass.

One focus of the presentation will be the Sinamics family of drives with uniform engineering for all plant areas. It offers everything from simple frequency inverters for the batch plant, right up to highly dynamic drive systems in further processing. The Simotion motion control system is especially suitable for machines with demanding motion functions; in cutting systems for the manufacture of float glass, for example, or for shaping in glass container manufacture. Flexible implementation of the most diverse machines is possible thanks to Simotion’s modular design, with PC, controller or drive-based versions. The Sinumerik 840D sl CNC control is especially suitable for applications demanding high dynamic response and precision, such as in the further processing of flat glass. Sinumerik 840D sl has the same design as the Sinamics S120 drives and, when combined with them, can control up to 31 axes.

Using a typical application in the glass industry, Siemens will present the performance of its Simatic PCS 7 process control system. This is supplemented by a sector-relevant product range of fault-tolerant, high-precision and reliable process instrumentation and analysis equipment that complies with all current international standards. The scalable Siemens process control system has a flexible system architecture and can be adapted individually to plant requirements. Operators can boost the productivity of their plants and increase their availability by means of the already integrated Asset Management and efficient engineering tools.

The Siemens range is based throughout on Profinet as the communication network for automation systems and drives. Its huge performance power will be demonstrated by a Simotion multi-axis model with combined video-stream and IRT (Isochronous Real Time) motion control operation. This will be applied at the "cold end" of float glass manufacture and in hollow glass shaping machinery where it is frequently necessary to coordinate 50 to 100 electrical axes, and process large volumes of I/O data, in real time.