Introducing field buses in presses for plastic material injection

This paper reports on some results obtained in the framework of a project aimed at designing a new generation of advanced presses for plastic material injection used to produce washing machine tubs. The distributed control system of the new press relies on fieldbus communications. This enables a dramatic decrease in both the cabling complexity and cost, together with a significant improvement in the performance of the whole machine. The adoption of the field network has been carefully evaluated by means of a preliminary theoretical analysis. Then, two test systems have been implemented to collect data and performance figures by carrying out experiments and measures on some of the real devices selected for the design of press control equipment.