Research And Development Of Flue Gas Channel Production Line Automation

Cement flue gas channel is a kind of pipe product for dwellings. Aiming at the mould casting method of production, the flues are produced by single-function mould and manual operation in domestic. This kind of production technology and equipment is difficult to achieve automatic or large-scale production and the quality of the products are not up to standard. However, through the years of research and practice in this field we find that innovating production technology and equipment can achieve automatic production. Using new equipments and technologies to realize the automatic production is the general trend.To realize automatic production, the mould is designed into two parts and the auto scaling inner mould is fixed on the workbench, and the adjustable outer mould is recyclable, and this realizes that different types of products could be produced at the same day in one production line. Drawing the excess water by using the liquid-ring vacuum pump can make the flues achieve inner demoulding strength in 30 minutes, and after that 4 hours' steam preservation can make it achieve outer demoulding strength lifting strength.After the mechanical and electrical equipments are designed and the process and control requirements are analyzed, mature industrial control application cases are researched and a distributed control system based on Siemens S7 series PLC(Programmable Logic Controller) is developed. The automatic production of mechanical, electrical, hydraulic and pneumatic integration has been realized through replacing the traditional manual operation by high technologies, such as PLC, HMI(Human Machine Interface), sensors, stepping motors and bus technology. Effective producing can be done as the application of effective queuing strategy as well as the automatic transportation and recognition technology of outer mould. The auto scaling of inner mold can be realized by stepping motor on the workbench. The operational state of product line can be monitored and controlled by HMI device. And on the other side, HMI device can also be used to operate by operator. Also, real time communicating between HMI and PLC can be easily realized by ProfiBus and MPI communication.Field debugging and early operation shows that the flue gas channel automatic production line designed in this paper with high reliability and practicability, and the production efficiency and product quality stability are increased and the long-run cost and labor intensity is reduced, so the expected effect is achieved. This research results will have bright prospect of marketing and application as it's a typical case of design and implementation of an automated production line.