The Road to Gen3

通用磨坊工程师戴夫·卢兹（Dave Lutz）是包装行业所说的“ 3代”自动化设备的重要支持者。

That’s not surprising, given that Lutz, a senior packaging engineering specialist at the Minneapolis company, has seen dramatic improvements in reliability and performance from his firm’s Gen3 cartoning equipment, when compared to earlier generation machines. In fact, says Lutz, since General Mills took delivery on its first Gen3 machine in early 2000, the company has now standardized on the technology for all of its high-end cartoning needs.

对于General Mills Inc.来说，通往GEN3的道路始于1996年，当时消费者食品巨头着手为其自动化包装线找到了根本改进的纸箱。卢兹（Lutz）观察到，该公司在公司北美工厂负责纸币机器标准的卢兹（Lutz）观察到：“我们正在寻找一件需要几乎零维护的设备，提供更高的正常运行时间，并为我们提供更高的可靠性和性能。”

That’s when the concept for a machine designed from the ground up to make maximum use of closed loop servo control technology—a hallmark of Gen3 equipment—began to take shape between General Mills and a few of its key machine suppliers. “When we started the program, we weren’t requiring servos,” Lutz says. “But when we approached a number of key cartoner vendors, a lot of them said that the only way they could meet our requirements was by using servos.”

At the time, the packaging industry was in the early stages of servo technology application. Some vendors were retrofitting traditional mechanical packaging machines with small numbers of servo motors and drives to handle a limited number of motion axes. The result was a class of hybrid machines that included both electrical and mechanical motion control elements—a design style that has come to be known today as a “Generation 2.” While these machines led to some improvements, they were often more expensive than their all-mechanical predecessors, and their advantages were often limited.

通用磨坊想要更多。卢兹说，该公司的新纸箱设备有很多目标。他说，除其他事项外，通用工厂工程师正在寻找一台具有99％的运营效率的机器，每天能够每周，每周7天，一年能够进行三班。该机器必须是模块化且高度灵活的，可以实现快速的产品转换，并具有处理各种纸箱尺寸的能力。

Minimal installation and start-up procedures—requiring 36 hours or less—were also extremely important, says Lutz. “We were going through a lot of changes, and every time we put a machine in, we were impacting the business by three or four days,” he notes. “So we wanted something that we could install, say, on a Saturday, and have running by Sunday night.”

Other requirements included simplified controls and attention to operator ergonomics. And as a way to reduce maintenance requirements, and cut down on part inventory needs, General Mills wanted a cartoner machine design that could be manufactured using 60 percent fewer parts than previous machines, says Lutz. A lower part count would also make the new machines faster for the vendor to assemble, meaning quicker deliveries. “We were looking for the first machine to ship within six months from the date we ordered it,” says Lutz, “and we wanted all future machines to ship within three months from date of order.”

卢兹说，与当前一代的高端纸箱系统相比，General Mills还希望将新机器的价格大大降低。

Too expensive

“A lot of the vendors that we talked to told us that they didn’t think there was a need for this type of machine, and that nobody would buy it, so it would be too expensive,” says Lutz. “That’s why our list of vendors was reduced to two or three very quickly, because back in 1996, a lot of people didn’t understand how to correctly use servo technology.”

According to Lutz, knowing how to use servo technology is as important in the packaging industry as the technology itself. To simply replace an AC motor with a servo motor on a mechanical machine, without eliminating the associated mechanical complexity, will do little beyond increasing the cost of the machine, he says. “A true Gen3 machine eliminates the mechanical transmission, eliminates the torque shoe and eliminates the auxiliary drive component,” he declares.

General Mills最终与R.A.紧密合作在纸箱项目上工作。Jones＆Co。Inc.是一家总部位于辛辛那提的包装解决方案提供商，以前曾为该公司生产纸箱。

“We worked and partnered very closely with General Mills on a clean-sheet design, embracing third-generation servo concepts,” confirms John Finck, R.A. Jones senior vice president. “It was a challenge for us make the leap from the current products we had to the new generation design, and to rethink the way we did things,” Finck allows. But the result of the effort was a new, Gen3 machine called the Criterion 2000 that not only largely met General Mills design requirements, but has also been “a very successful product” for Jones, says Finck.

General Mills took delivery on its first Criterion 2000 machine in early 2000 at its Minneapolis research lab, says Lutz. Instead of the all-mechanical or hybrid electrical/mechanical designs seen on earlier Gen1 and Gen2 cartoners, the new Gen3 machine relied on an electronic line shafting design incorporating Serial Realtime Communication System (SERCOS) fiber optic networking with nine servos and integrated motion control supplied by Rexroth Indramat, now known as Bosch Rexroth Corp., Hoffman Estates, Ill.

期望超出

“The first cartoner we ran really exceeded our expectations,” says Lutz. “It was able to accept a much higher range of (carton size) tolerances than what our quality indexes were, so it had even greater flexibility than we required.” General Mills engineers tested the machine for about two months in the lab, then moved it to a production plant, where it was put through its paces in a real-world environment for about another 12 months before any additional machines were ordered, Lutz observes.

在一组测试中,工程师跑新Gen3 cartoner in a side-by-side comparison against an older mechanical machine. The results showed dramatic gains for the Gen3 equipment, says Lutz, including a 10 percent improvement in packaging line performance, due to the new machine’s improved reliability and efficiency; a 75 percent reduction in product changeover times, going from “a couple of hours to just minutes;” a 60 percent average reduction in required maintenance; and a 40 percent improvement in recovery time when jams occurred.

“When a mechanical machine jams, there is a very loud bang. Unless you’ve got a very large brake on it, the machine coasts, because you’ve got a lot of inertia and mass that is moving at a very high speed,” Lutz observes. A servo-based machine can be stopped much more quickly, he says, because the electronic control system can drive the machine to a stop.

卢茨说：“使用机械机器，如果没有及时停止，那么很多事情都可以轻松地摆脱调整，因为一切都是奴隶在其他方面驱动的。”这意味着操作员或维护人员通常需要一组扳手和螺丝刀将机器重置为零。相比之下，在基于伺服的机器上，“当我按重置按钮时，每个动作都独立于另一个，他们都回到了他们的最后一个状态，您可以再次开始，”卢兹说。“没有时间，因为它是电子轴。”

Dial it in

Electronic line shafting also supports significantly faster machine installation and startup, as well as much quicker product changeovers. “We actually had one person, who had never seen the new cartoner, but was able to change it over in less than 20 minutes, without the need for any tools” Lutz says. The bulk of the work involved “dialing everything in from the HMI (human machine interface),” he says, “without having to go out to the machine and loosen something up, move it and tighten it back up again, which is what you have to do with a mechanical machine.”

Another Gen3 advantage is improved diagnostics and predictive maintenance capabilities, says Lutz. “With a mechanical machine, the only way we knew for sure that we had a problem and that something was going to fail, was to go out there with a lot of tools and check it out,” he notes. But the control system on the company’s Gen3 equipment enables real-time tracking of machine data, such as changes in servo torque loads, which can indicate possible problems. “We can chart that right on the HMI,” says Lutz. “If there’s a change in torque response on a specific drive, it can either generate a (maintenance) work order automatically, or it can raise an indication to the operator to get somebody out there to look at it before the next changeover.” Detailed machine data can also be monitored remotely.

最后，与上一代机器相比，Criterion 2000 Cartoner能够实现通用工厂在项目开始时实现的目标，其中包括零件计数的60％和基本价格降低30％卢兹说。

The Gen3 technology is not needed in all General Mills cartoning applications. In situations where lines are running only a single shift daily or where high speed or flexibility is not at a premium, less capable, older generation machines will fit the bill, Lutz notes. But for many of the company’s mainstay products, for which lines are running three-shift, seven days per week operations, and where the need for flexibility is high, the Gen3 cartoner technology is the standard within General Mills, he says.

对于这类行，“自此开发和测试完成以来，我们已经完成的所有项目都是Gen3机器，” Lutz说。“我们没有购买任何机械机器。”他说，该公司现在在美国各个地点使用了大约10台Criterion 2000机器，并希望将来随着业务需求的规定增加更多。“ R.A.琼斯已被选为我们的纸箱联盟合作伙伴。”卢兹补充说。

What’s next? “We’re looking to apply the Gen3 technology to the rest of our packaging line,” Lutz responds. “We’ve done it on the cartoner. And now we’re looking at our other machines.”

See sidebar to this article: Price and Service are Gen3 Issues