To get an inkling of the impact that advances in motion control technology have had on packaging, step into your local supermarket, stroll over to the snack aisle and look at the chips. Odds are you’ll find some variety packs—you know, four different flavors, each with its own bag design, all enclosed in a single package. Perform that same stroll in different parts of the country and you will notice that the contents of that variety pack change, based on regional preferences, as determined by market research. And if you find a combination of flavors that you like, better

“Today, it’s all about time to market, configurability and being able to grow with your market,” says Mike Wagner, business development manager for the Global OEM Team, for vendor Rockwell Automation Inc.,
Milwaukee. This requires packaging equipment that is flexible enough to permit rapid changeover from one type of packaging to another.

Small and smart

The key word for packaging today is integration, and it’s evident in the new generation of servo modules that combine the servo motor and drive into a single compact package. Attempts to combine these components began more than a decade ago, with varying degrees of success. Recent advances in semiconductor technology, however, have allowed technology providers to make these units smaller and, more importantly, smarter. Case in point: the GenNext series from Bosch Rexroth Corp.,
Hoffman Estates , Ill.

GenNext is a series of motion and control products whose hallmark is distributed intelligence. “With GenNext, the processors are in the drive itself,” explains Al Morin, packaging industry specialist for Bosch Rexroth. “As the electronic components became lower cost and you could get more functionality out of them, it only made sense to put more intelligence in the drive.”

While some might think that this would add more cost to the system, the opposite is actually true, according to Morin. “It actually gives you a lower-cost system because now you don’t have to be concerned with how many processors you need to run a big system,” he notes. “With a system like this, you can run from one up to 64 axes with one control, so the cost doesn’t go up on the control end; you’re just adding drives as you need them for your application.

“Of course, when you add additional processors, you have to do additional programming,” adds Morin. “You have to get those processors talking to each other, you have to coordinate them. But as far as performance goes, you are not going to see any degradation in the controller as you add axes, because each axis brings with it its own intelligence. And of course, you’re not going to see any degradation in machine performance either, and machine performance translates into throughput.”

Integrated servo modules can potentially help reduce the time it takes to build a machine, and decrease its installation time and cost. As Morin points out, they can in some cases reduce control costs. Importantly, integrating drives with motors also reduces cabinet space.

Targeting cabinet space

"I’ve been involved in motion control for my entire career,” says Rockwell’s Wagner, “and there is no doubt that the proliferation of servos has been great in terms of flexibility, cost and accuracy. The problem is that you've ended up with so many servos that the cabinet becomes bigger than the machine itself. That's a real problem, given the fact that plant floor space is a limited and valuable commodity. Where do you put all these large, bulky cabinets? It kind of defeats all the effort that has gone into shrinking the footprint of the machines.”

Elau Inc., a Shaumburg,
Ill., packaging controls vendor, claims a reduction in cabinet space with its new iSH integrated servo module by, in some cases, as much as 16 to one. A concomitant benefit is the reduction in wiring. This is a benefit that adheres to all integrated servo modules. The iSH seeks to up the ante, by replacing the ...