SMTCL plants contain horizontal and vertical machining centers, conventional and CNC-machine tools

 

Since the current identification tool couldn't meet the growing requirements of the plant any longer, the Shenyang Machine Tool Co. Ltd. replaced it with wireless RFID technology from Turck. The BL ident system can easily be integrated into already existing infrastructures, due to the variety of available components, like tags, read/write heads, and IP20 and IP67 rated gateways and interface modules.

With a business volume of about 660 million Euro in 2009 the Northeast-Chinese Shenyang Machine Tool Co. Ltd. (SMTCL) is not only the biggest manufacturer of tools in China – the company is also one of the biggest providers of metal processing lathes, drilling and milling machines worldwide. The company was founded in 1995 and offers conventional and CNC-machine tools for numerous industries, including automotive, rail (transit), shipping, aviation and aerospace, and defense.

To guarantee the high performance and reliability of the machine tools, and to optimize production capacities to ensure plant availability, the Chinese manufacturer relies on identification technology from Turck. The BL ident modular RFID-system provides a reliable and powerful solution for monitoring and tracing the diverse cutting tools that are used in the machine tools.

Turck's BL ident gateway communicates via Profibus-DP with the PLC

Frequent tool changes

The need for real-time information about the current location of each tool is rising with the increasing degree of automation at the manufacturing plant and the rising frequency of tool changes. Because of this, SMTCL decided to replace their identification system with the wireless solution from Turck. Thanks to this modular system with robust data carriers (tags), read/write heads of different types and sizes, as well as IP20 and IP67 rated gateways, the identification system from Turck can easily be integrated into already existing automation structures and expanded if needed. That is how SMTCL could achieve communication with controls from different manufacturers, like Fanuc Robotics and Siemens. “There was no additional programming effort during the implementation of the system, and that is why we will rely on Turck's BL ident system in the future,” asserts Chengjun Lin, construction engineer at Shenyang Machine Tool Co. Ltd.

 

The robust read/write head on the machine reads the RFID tag on the cutting tool as soon as it is inserted

Continuous monitoring is well organized at SMTCL: A FRAM data carrier with a memory capacity of two kilobytes is attached to every new cutting tool. Before the tool is sent to the warehouse, all the relevant data, such as unique ID, type, control time or current position, is written to the tag. The data is read by the read/write heads on the warehouse doors at the production plants and forwarded to the controls at a central database. In this way, personnel knows where each cutting tool is located at any time – even during the plant operation – and if it needs to be replaced or repaired.

Flexible solution

Implementing Turck's BL ident RFID system allowed SMTCL to increase its production efficiency remarkably and reduce manufacturing and maintenance costs at the same time. The variety of available components – from tags to read/write heads to IP20 and IP67 rated gateways and interface modules – allows Turck's BL ident system to adapt to nearly all identification scenarios. Different fieldbus protocols (Profibus-DP, DeviceNet, CANopen, Profinet IO, Ethernet Modbus TCP and EtherNet/IP) and transmission frequencies (HF/UHF) increase the versatility even further, and allow an efficient identification solution.