"By making the best use of high quality material, the operational costs are kept to a minimum and an extremely high degree of reliability and system availability is achieved," said CSi marketing manager Leon Nelen. "High availability, high reliability and cost effectiveness were the key design criteria for this new line of products."
Because of the integrated control concept of the new i-Veyor range, Nelen claims that considerable cost and time saving schedule can be achieved on the design, installation and commissioning of a new installation. The conveyors are controlled by a standard control cabinet, equipped with industrial PC (IPC) and a touch screen.
"One control cabinet is able to control 40 conveyor modules," he told FoodProductionDaily.com. "For communication with higher control systems like ERP, the IPC has a standard Ethernet connection available."
To optimise the modular concept, all sensors are connected to the control cabinet by the plug and play field wiring bus enabling additional sensors to be easily added. The conveyors have integrated cable-trunks in the construction for the field bus I/O and power cables.
The software used is real time, multitasking and event driven, which the Netherlands-based company says will guarantee very high system availability. This is especially pertinent with the General Food Law coming into effect, which makes reliable tracking and tracing functionality essential.
Under the new laws, food producers must be able to identify products by batch, lot or consignment numbers and traceability of the product must be possible at all stages of production, processing and distribution.
This means food businesses will have to be able to identify every supplier of food, feed, a food producing animal or any substance incorporated into their food/feed products. CSi says that complete traceability comes as standard in the software.
Another improvement is the use of ultra sonar sensors for product detection. All sensors are integrated into the conveyors and cannot be damaged by passing products and/or persons.
"We have used ultra sonar sensors instead of the usual photocells," said Nelen. "One of the advantages of this is that once you put them in place, you don't need to readjust them."
Certain components and materials have been used to ensure minimum wear and tear and low maintenance attention. Because of the high level of standardisation, only a limited number of spare parts are required.
CSi is exhibiting at the forthcoming TOTAL 2004 event at the NEC, Birmingham, UK on stand number 4456.