A tobacco plant is a complicated environment with a variety of manufacturing machines, including tobacco shredding machines, drying machines, cigarette making machines, packing machines and more. Throughout the plant, there are also a wide range of temperatures and voltages used; thus, the industrial computers (IPC) applied must be robust and reliable.
Additionally, the IPCs need to have PCI expansion slots for inserting cards to link with legacy PLCs at the production lines. On the other hand, as the monitoring system has to collect and transmit large amounts of data, powerful CPUs for the industrial PCs, and rapid and reliable Ethernet are required.
The monitoring machines provided by Advantech to this tobacco plant are stand-alone machines specially designed for this customer. Each of the machines contains a fanless industrial computer (UNO-3282) inside and a 19” TFT LCD touch screen (FPM-3191G) as a front panel human-machine interface (HMI). The FPM-3191G with stainless steel chassis and NEMA4/IP65 compliant aluminum front panel provides reliable functionality in the harsh and dusty environments.
Additionally, the UNO-3282 is a high-performance automation computer with a powerful Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Its expansion capability, a choice of two PCI expansion slots or one PCIe plus one PCI slots, provides connection to the device level PLCs. The UNO-3282 also has dual teaming-capable gigabit LAN Ethernet ports linking to an Ethernet network with the monitoring machines. Its LAN redundancy and battery-backup SRAM both ensure the consistency of Ethernet networking and data transmissions even in the event of Ethernet breakdown or power breakdown.
At the device level, tobacco manufacturing machines and PLCs are connected using the Profibus protocol. The UNO-3282 then collects data from these PLCs and transmits the data up to central control room. The data is also shown on the FPM-3191G monitor, which allows the operators in the plant to easily read information displayed on the screen and give orders with a touch of their fingers.
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