Tracks faults
September 1st 2007

A Welsh automotive component manufacturer believes an FTR Faultracker to be the best investment it has made this year.

The company, which produces steering assemblies on highly automated production cells, was losing tens of thousands of pounds due to apparently inexplicable faults in the cell control systems.

An FTR was linked to the machine to monitor 16 sensor inputs to the PLC. When a crash occurred, the FTR was downloaded to a PC for analysis. This showed that one sensor 'glitched' when it should have been quiet. The glitch was attributed to centrifugal forces on an indexing table which only occurred with the machine running at full speed.

The FTR Faultracker is available from RS Components and direct from Laplace Instruments.