SAEL rebuilds drives at Burgo Group’s Sarego paper mill
A fault occurred to Drives at Burgo paper mill – blades drive application – was enough to warn the Management and go for a change. Actually all the drives mounted on this application are 10 years old: their spare parts were not longer available. It’s a common strategy of many suppliers to obsolete their Drives after few years. This allows to be focused on the new technologies but obliges the customer to manage a machine with the electrical section who gets old much faster than the mechanical one.
SAEL approaches the market in a different way: the After Sales Department can repair any old equipment and the R&D, continuously focused on the new technologies, improves the Drives with a full compatibility vs. the former versions as much as the existing systems. Moreover SAEL can work on existing competitor equipments, offering full revamping/rebuilding and saving a lot of their parts, offering a great cost saving and value selling.
Burgo Group has two machines equipped with the same Drives who mount Electrolytic capacitors inside – near to the end of their live cycle. The switch to SAEL was a must to overcome the solution. Actually the Platform ONE inverters by SAEL are the only drives equipped by film capacitors – infinite lifetime – and they can be easily linked to the majority HW and SW architectures used. The sheeter cam algorithm – which is the core of the system – as much as all the other operations within the paper mill application (positioning, pull controls, load balancing, electrical shafts, and so on) are inside on SAEL’s Platform ONE regulation board. One board is used as spare parts for all SAEL’s drives (DC, AC and BLDC). The system had to face with the present global automation management – three S7 400 PLC as much as many video keyboards. No main SW modification was made to the existing system were allowed, and the full integration with the existing parts was mandatory – ensuring no changes to the original diagnostic functions.
The mounting of the new drives into the original electrical cabinet was quick and efficient. In a very short time SAEL changed the old drives, the DC-Bus – on phase off – and its capacitors: older than the others within the drives. Thanks to their own functions, the Platform ONE by SAEL allowed to remove many auxiliary analogical/digital boards originally used by the existing system. This means less spare parts and higher reliability, of course.
Within one week – tests and settings included – the machine was ready to produce. Moreover was possible to fulfil an important need: to use the machine with one drive/motors in case of single fault. The communication between the existing system and the SAEL Platform ONE Drives is made by a Profibus interface. A CANBUS network is used to manage the signals between the Drives and the PLC. A second Syncro-high performance CANBUS network manager the data exchange between Blade 1 and Blade 2: The pull motor and the blade motor are synchronized by this second network. The electric cutting management have been modified and updated at the hardware level in 2 days and in the subsequent three days of testing the system is gradually broken down at full capacity, providing some new features and possibilities of aging that were previously denied to the system.
