Proposta de modernização de um sistema de esteira transportadora de cargas

Abstract

Due to the recent context of constant technological innovations, adjustments and improvements reveals as a strategy to make obsolete systems accepted by the present-day demands. Thus, the goal of this project is to develop an approach to make available to the use a didactic plant for a load conveyor system according to the equipment of recurrent use in the Industrial Networking II laboratory of the Control and Automation Engineering program at the Federal University of Uberlândia. By studying the original system's composition, the purpose is to bring forward methods to modernize it, by replacing the controller. And so, based on the chosen solution, will be described the procedures performed to build up a communication network for the control of the conveyor's motor, using a frequency inverter over the Modbus protocol, in addition to the control of the load cell by local I/O. In order to reach it, based on the study of the original structure, a scenario was defined to modernize the system. In this new configuration, would have another PLC as the main controller of system, which using the Modbus protocol, would be responsible for controlling the system, for communicating with the electronic power devices and get the inputs and outputs values from the original PLC. In the tests, the developed approach was successful to put the system in operation. Using a sniffer software was possible to take a closer look at the communication network. The analysis of the exchanged packages shows that in a scan cycle was sent needless requests for one same slave and was noticed some moments of inactivity.