The thesis presents an automatic packing line for the packing of wood pellets into bags. The purpose of the development of the line was to increase the production and decrease production expenses for a company which produces and packs the wood pellets.
An introduced automatic packing line consists of two main parts; the first one being a pellet-feeding system and the second one an automatic packing machine (APM). Pellet-feeding system is equipped with a feeding unit which contains a weighing scale, a stock unit and four feeders. Two of those feeders have a task of rough feeding whereas the other two perform a job of fine feeding of the material. In addition, the system also contains two electronic instruments IMK IM-227, both of which have feeding functions and are intended to handle and display the data about the measured mass. The second part of the wood pellets packing line is an APM Pentavac Penta 3100 with the built-in output conveyor. In addition to developing a program which would control the pellet-feeding system, set and calibrate the electronic instruments of the IMK IM-227, my task was also to set up and test the operation of the line.
In order to calibrate the system, I used a programmable logical controller (PLC) Siemens Logo 24 RC which contains 8 digital inputs and 4 relay outputs. I chose this controller because of its suitability, efficiency and optimal cost. The program was written in the program language called functional blog diagram (FBD) in a programming software Siemens Logo Software Comfort V8.0. This software is used for programming of the controllers of the Logo series.
While creating an automatic line I spent most of the time writing the program. Since at first I did not know all of the components included in the machine and their principal behaviour, the greatest challenge was to determine its concept. After that my task of writing a program was much easier.
In the first part of my thesis I present a line for the packing of the wood pellets and the hardware used to develop it. Further on I focus mostly on the writing of the program for controlling the pellet-feeding system and configuration of the hardware.
In the final part of my thesis I gathered all the findings which were based on the development of the automatic line and presented some of the possible upgrades of the line.
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