Foundry crane lifted by open communications

CC-Link open comms has played a key role in the refurbishment of a massive overhead crane at the EMZ foundry in Ukraine, boosting productivity and giving energy savings such that payback on control system investment will be a matter of months.

EMZ opted for CC-Link, an open field device level network that provides high speed deterministic comms, linking a range of automation technologies over a single cable. It is suitable for machine, cell or process control in manufacturing and production industries.

The project was a six axis drive system and engineers, CSC Automation identified Mitsubishi drives as having dedicated crane drive software. It was decided to fulfil all processing requirements through a single Mitsubishi Q-series PLC, and to provide operator information through one main and two secondary HMIs. A regenerative power converter enables the crane to harvest and store electrical energy that would normally be part of the system losses.

All these field devices are connected individually onto the CC-Link network, with no need for complicated interfacing.