Wittmann makes Industry 4.0 Plug and Produce router for safer networked mould swaps
Wittmann has developed an Industry 4.0 router to make mould change easier and safer, to combine all appliances in a production cell and represent the entire production cell externally with a single IP address.
The router can connect mould temperature controllers and chillers, material dryers and gravimetric or volumetric blenders. The injection moulding machine and the appliances connected to it – where necessary also including a robot with downstream automation and quality inspection – are combined with each other to form an injection moulding production cell. To ensure faultless production of a part, all these individual appliances within the production cell must be programmed with the correct mould-specific parameters.
Parameters can be saved in the injection moulding machine’s UNILOG B8 control system. As soon as a given mould data set is selected on the machine’s control system, the appropriate settings are transmitted to all other appliances in the production cell. The means of communication used in this case is an Ethernet network operating with the standardised Industry 4.0 OPC UA application protocol.
In the opposite direction, the Wittmann 4.0 Router also makes sure that an injection moulding machine can only recognise those peripherals which are present in its own production cell.
As soon as a production cell has been equipped with the necessary peripherals for a new product, the data set with the production parameters can be distributed within the production cell. If this data set is not already recorded in the injection moulding machine, the machine can also retrieve it from an MES system to which it has access. In this case, the data are routed via the firewall integrated in the Wittmann 4.0 Router. The parameters (e.g. dosing formulation, robot teach program, drying parameters, settings for tempering and cooling) are subsequently distributed from the machine to the peripherals and the robot in the production cell. Once this is done, production can start immediately.