Design Of Rake Feeder Control System And Its Fault Diagnosis

The level of production automation is an important condition for enterprises to participate in international competition. Jinxi Natural Chemical Co., Ltd's control system of rake feeder is still using 80's control devices, while the devices have been unable to meet the production requirements with the expansion of production and continuous improvements of automatic control. The rake feeder is one of critical processes for enterprise, its operating conditions is directly related to the production of urea, so ensuring the normal operation of its stability is very important to the fertilizer companies. Taking into account the sustainable development of the market, the Co., Ltd improved the rake feeder control system in June, 2008.This paper described the background and tasks of issues, research level of automation at home and abroad. It proposed design and modification programs for the problems of rake feeder control system. It used PROFIBUS-DP bus to achieve the control function of the PLC master and distributed I/O auxiliary station, according to the process requirements. It used SIEMENS S7-400 for the data acquisition and control system as hardware and STEP75.1 for software programming. PC used WinCC configuration software to achieve monitoring and management capabilities of the system.Based on the importance of rake feeder in the production flow, some possible faults in running process of rake feeder contro system are analyzed, for example, running faut, lifter fault, and system fault. Those faults are diagnosed and resolved, in order to ensure the normal state of production.After rake feeder control system having been improved and put into operation, it not only improves the packing speed, but also made the management level achieve a higher level. Also it improved the working environment for operators. It provided explore direction for automatic transformation of the Jinxi Natural Chemical Co., Ltd and created great economic value.