Mitsubishi Press Automation & Control

Case Study #1

Project: 400 Ton Fukui

Scope: The customer had an old Mitsubishi control on their high production press, and they wanted to add a recently purchased feed line to it as well. With the controls being outdated and obsolete, an electrical upgrade was required to be able to add the new feed line. The scope of this project was to supply a new electrical control system for the press and tie it in with the new feed line purchased by the customer. The customer wanted to stick with the Mitsubishi platform since the rest of their machines are Mitsubishi as well. As an added pressure, TIS was the first U.S. company to do major work in this plant.

Press Control System Included:

Method: The first thing the engineer on this job had to do was take an investigative trip to the customer. This trip is especially important because it allows the engineer to ask any questions he has, develop an installation plan, and survey the press in its entirety. After the investigative trip, the engineer returned with the information he gathered and began to design the new control system. For this job, the engineer used Toledo's PP150 to control the clutch/brake on the press and used the Mitsubishi plc to control everything else on the press as well as the feedline integration.

Typically, we use an encoder for position with a Mitsubishi plc because there is not a standard resolver module for it. In the process of designing this control, we found a different solution to the press position using a third-party resolver and plc module. The engineer researched this solution and decided to use it for this job. He was able to successfully obtain and program the resolver and plc module to accomplish the task seamlessly. The customer purchased an automatic slide adjust option, which allows them to select a new job from the operator screen and the machine will adjust the slide to the correct height automatically. To do this job, another position device is required, and the engineer was able to use the same solution that was used for press position.

One of the visual improvements of this control upgrade was to replace the column operator stations with metal "skins" instead of adding more control boxes to the press. The skins were manufactured with the operator screen and push buttons to allow for easy setup and production. The customer also opted to reuse a lot of the existing control wire that was in place as well as cable tray that was already ran into the basement of the facility. An issue that came from reusing the cables was that the customer wanted to get rid of the existing quick connects so we had to cut those off and rewire the cables directly from the control panel to the press.

Before the commissioning started, the engineer was able to work with the plc at our office to get a head start on the programming. The customer wanted to reuse all the sensors on the press. It is normal to find a broken or disconnected sensor upon the start of commissioning, but this press was abnormal in that there were numerous sensors that were either broken or jumped out of the program prior to the upgrade. Working with the customer, the engineer was able to locate and integrate each of the replacement press sensors into the control.




Results: The engineer worked very closely with the customer and their personnel on the floor. There were many programming requests from the customer such as additions to the operator screen. The customer even added an additional operator screen at the exit to help improve production and operator interface.

In being the first U.S. company to do major work for this customer, there were many sets of eyes on our engineer and installers throughout the whole project. In the end, the project was a success their high production press ran naturally with the purchased feed line and the customer was very pleased with the work done by TIS.