High Speed Meat Processing/Cooking Line
Faced with increasing product demands and environmental discharge problems, the owner of a consumer products manufacturing plant invested in a $40 million capacity expansion project that would replace its outdated equipment with a state-of-the-art operation.
Challenges:
- Efficient line layout to produce the highest throughput.
- Plants first major project with Control Logix PLC and new safety relay technology.
- Employees needed to be trained to operate and troubleshoot the new technology.
- Major equipment vendors from Europe were required to standardize PLC, HMI and VFD..
Benefits:
- Automation substantially reduced staff to make product.
- Major reduction of utilities required to make product.
- Major reduction in discharge to sanitary sewer.
- Common control hardware made system less difficult to maintain.
- Use of ControlNet reduced capital cost by minimizing electrical wiring to I/O and VFD drives.
Project Included:
- Computer modeling to develop most efficient system
- Tie in to network database server to store critical data
- Casing stuffers
- Stuffed casing conveyors
- Empty mould conveyors
- Automatic loading equipment for mould
- Automatic loading of moulds into cook tanks
- Stock tanks for hot water, cool water & chilled brine
- Automatic cooking of meat in cook tanks
- Automatic unloading of moulds from cook tanks
- Automatic removal of cooked meat from moulds
- Automatic washing of moulds
- Over 100 VFDs required for automation
- Over 250 automatic sanitary valves
- Automatic CIP of system
