Packaging Machines in the Pharmaceutical Industry
The customer is manufacturing complete customized machines and production lines for high volume production of many different medical packaging systems. In order to verify the proper functioning of the production line the manufacturer is performing a quality test before the plant is delivered to the customer. The objective of the test measurement is to confirm that the equipment is working to its standards and that that the sterilisation processes is also meeting the required standards.
In the past the acceptance test measurement and documentation was based on a mainly manually data recoding process and the report was also manually generated in Excel. The customer was looking for a solution to simplify the data recoding and to automated the report generation.
The data acquisition project is based on a universal ProfiSignal application which is independent of the connected data acquisition hardware. The user can record data from the analog inputs of the Expert Key and record values from the machine PLC system via OPC server at the same time.
The data recoding application is based in measurements from dedicated thermocouple and pressure sensors which are connected directly to the Expert Key 200 unit and on temperature and pressure readings from the Siemens S7 PLC which are interfaced to the DataService Configurator via OPC Server.
The application is divided into 2 separate programs. One program is dedicated to record the data from the Expert Key unit and the machine Siemens S7 PLC via OPC server.The second program is dedicated to analyse the recoded data and to automatically generate a test report.
The interesting feature of this apparition is that the ProfiSignal Klicks application was developed in a way that the customer can record data of any hardware which is connected to the DataServiceConfigurator. The customer can connect channels from any DAQ device like Expert Key, TopMessage, LogMessage, ProfiMessage or any third party devices from (VTI, HBM, PSI; Adam Module, DataTranslation etc..) which are supported by a driver. The ProfiSignal application records data from the Expert Key hardware and reading from the PLC via the OPC interface into one HDS data file. The user can also perform an offset calibration of each channel if required. The data recoding is performed completely independently from the data analysis and report generation.
