Simotion Application for Pak Technologies Hawk 180

CNC Design and Pak Technologies have continued their successful partnership with the rollout of two new Hawk machines, now with Siemens’ next generation motion control product, Simotion.

Past versions of the plastic cup filling and sealing line have been realised using a Siemens S7-300 range PLC, with Masterdrives MC drives and 1FT6 servomotors for the six positioning axes.

Simotion takes the position control loop out of the drives, allowing the use of a cheap speed-controlled servo system. Our choice was Simodrive 611. The Simotion programming tool enabled us to effortlessly set up a master/slave motion system, with slave axes performing both gearing and camming.

As well as Simotion’s motion control capability, the latest Hawk machines take advantage of the controller’s inbuilt PID temperature control. Plausability checks, gradient checks, limit checks, PID auto-tuning and pulse width modulation are all core elements of the temperature control functionality.

Because Simotion can optionally be programmed with ladder logic, it was possible to simply copy code from Step 7 for peripheral machine functions.

Overall, the Simotion motion control solution significantly reduced the programming effort required for the Hawk machines. Where previously the machine software was distributed between PLC and advanced drive system, Simotion has brought all the software under the one easily configured control platform.