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Maschinen­bau Brunner GmbH

 

Maschinenbau Brunner GmbH develops customized machinery much faster with Selmo.

Article courtesy of x-technik IT & Medien GmbH.

Acceleration through automated PLC programming: Maschinenbau Brunner GmbH develops and produces machines and systems unavailable on the market. By switching from classic PLC programming to automated PLC programming with the Selmo Solution, their business unit, Brunner Automation GmbH, has considerably accelerated software development for these complex mechatronic plants.
By Ing. Peter Kemptner, x-technik

  • Service
    Selmo Support
  • Industry
    Customized machinery for many applications
  • Location
    Wolfau, Austria

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Shortcut

The Objective: Development of a fully automatic assembly and packaging system.
Solution: Selmo method for automated creation of the PLC programs by describing the machine behaviour.
Benefits: Shortened development time, reliable software function right from the start.

Maschinenbau Brunner
Brunner Maschinenbau machine

Planning machines according to customer requirements and producing turn-key plants is the expertise of Maschinenbau Brunner GmbH in Wolfau in southern Burgenland. Founded in 2000, the company does not specialize in one industry or machines with specific functions. Instead, it develops and produces special machinery for automotive, building materials, plastics, food, and cosmetics manufacturers. These perform production, transport, and packaging tasks.

"The company grows with every completed project, and the customer base benefits from this knowledge and know-how, also through re-usage of previously constructed plant components," says DI Stefan Knöbl, Managing Partner of Maschinenbau Brunner GmbH. "These include a driverless transport system developed in-house for internal transport."

The bottleneck PLC programming

"For the control, drive and safety technology, we use the hardware of all established manufacturers," explains Christian Wilfing, automation engineer at Brunner Automation. "We can't always choose the make ourselves as the customer often specifies it."

The resulting diversity is a hurdle for software creation and commissioning. Automation engineers must be familiar with different systems and varied development environments. In addition, they have to program many parts of the programme several times due to the various platforms preferred by their customers. This also increases the effort for software testing and commissioning.

In addition, the continued success of Brunner Automation has created a growing need for PLC programmers, both for the initial creation of machine software and for software maintenance and troubleshooting. Since these skilled workers are in high demand and, at the same time, hard to find, Stefan Knöbl looked for more efficient ways to design software and make the commissioning and maintenance more effective.

DI Stefan Knöbl
"With the Selmo method, we managed to start at a higher level," he confirms. "It saved us much basic work, estimated at one month."
DI Stefan Knöbl
Managing Partner Brunner Automation

The Selmo Solution for Maschinenbau Brunner

The first project implemented with the Selmo method is a plant for producing rolling shutter gates at Zeman Bauelemente Produktionsgesellschaft GmbH. Trapezoidal profiles are produced directly from the aluminium sheet coil on a roll former. In the extension supplied by Maschinenbau Brunner, these profiles are fitted with additional components, linked together to form a door leaf of defined length, wound onto a core and finally packed.

At a kick-off meeting, the PLC programmes for a conveyor system were created, ported to a PLC and the virtual commissioning of the system up to a fault-free test run. The basis for this was their CAD models and a verbal process description. The task was completed within just three hours.

Programming with Selmo for Brunner Maschinenbau
Programming with Selmo for Brunner Maschinenbau

Very quickly productive

"The Selmo Solution eliminates the translation of machine behaviour into sequential instructions as an intermediate mental step," emphasises Christian Wilfing. "The lines of code are created automatically, and you can concentrate on creating core elements such as process steps and jumps." In the process, many errors known from classic PLC programming get caught early because, for example, collisions can be avoided very easily by defining blocking conditions.

As a result, the automation experts at Brunner Automation managed to switch from classic PLC programming to the Selmo method in less than three weeks, and this was without any training. However, they were happy to fall back on Selmo's support. "There, we always receive fast and competent support from experts who understand our problems very well," praises Christian Wilfing. "Even technical issues, which can still occur with such a young product, were solved very quickly."

Modelling of the machine with Selmo for Brunner Maschinenbau
Modelling of the machine with Selmo for Brunner Maschinenbau

Growing and expandable

Libraries with drivers are available in Selmo Studio for interaction with sensors and actuators. These increase with each application. "It is also effortless to program drivers yourself in the PLC manufacturer's development environment and export them to Selmo Studio," says Christian Wilfing, citing another way of expanding the open system. "In addition, we had a customised master-slave module made by Selmo."

Not only this, but in general, the switch to the Selmo method contributed a lot to saving time. In addition, virtual commissioning, which includes the entire drive technology, also contributes to this. For this purpose, Brunner Automation used a test case made available to the company by the supplier of the drive technology.

The Selmo Solution offers the opportunity to avoid stress and uncertainty through early testing and troubleshooting and reduces site time during commissioning. Although the project has not yet been completed and the practical test is still pending, the benefits of the Selmo method are clear to Stefan Knöbl. "With the Selmo method, we managed to get started at a higher level," he confirms. "It saved us much basic work, estimated at one month."

Christian Wilfing
"The Selmo method eliminates the translation of machine behavior into sequential instructions as an intermediate mental step. The lines of code are created automatically and you can concentrate on creating core elements such as process steps and jumps."
Christian Wilfing
Automation engineer Brunner Automation
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