Modern injection moulding machines are used across a number of manufacturing sectors and are sophisticated pieces of equipment which contain a wealth of information about the operation of the machine. Status and count information as well as alarm data, when coupled with the appropriate enterprise application software, are the key ingredients for an automatic performance monitoring, regulatory historian system or any other automatic system which can help you monitor your asset.

So the question is...

How do you connect and automatically retrieve data from an injection moulding machine to take advantage of the abundance of performance monitoring, data visualisation and logging software which exists on the market?

OPC - The Interoperability Standard for Industrial Automation

The vast majority of software applications for logging, displaying and analysing manufacturing data are compatible with the OPC standard. OPC is a software interface standard that allows enterprise level application software to communicate with industrial hardware devices. An OPC server is a piece of software which converts the communication protocol of the hardware device into the OPC protocol, allowing the enterprise application software to communicate with the device via the OPC server in a standard way. Further information on the OPC protocol can be found on the OPC Foundation’s website.

Injection Moulding Machine Communication Protocol

EUROMAP was established 1964 and is the umbrella organization of the European plastics and rubber machinery industry. In July 2000, in conjunction with its US counterpart (The Society of the Plastics Industry, SPI), it released the EUROMAP63 protocol which is the latest industry standard protocol for communicating with Injection Moulding Machines. The aim was to standardise the master computer interfaces of injection moulding machines from different manufacturers, making it easier for third parties to produce software for communication with the machines. The EUROMAP63 protocol defines commands for the upload and download of data to the machine, via FTP over TCP/IP, which allow the monitoring or setup of key machine parameters.

ICONICS Moulding Machine OPC Server

In 2013 ICONICS France released an OPC server specifically for Moulding Machines which is compatible with the EUROMAP63 protocol (and its predecessor Euromap15 as well as KraussMaffei MC3 and Ferromatik Protocol2). The OPC server is certified to operate with the leading injection moulding machine manufacturers including Engel ,Fanuc, KraussMaffei, Engel, Netstal and Ferromatik. Once communication is established with the machine, setup and configuration of the server is a simple exercise using the user friendly configuration interface shown below.

By connecting or bridging the machine on which the OPC server software resides to the enterprises network, the moulding machine data can be easily accessed by a host of third party OPC compliant software including ICONICS own suite of Visualisation , Analytics and Manufacturing Intelligence applications.

Harness the power of Visualisation, Analytics and Manufacturing Intelligence software applications with ICONICS Moulding Machine OPC Server

If you have an Injection Moulding Machine in your plant and you have limited or no visibility of its operation, a Moulding Machine OPC Server from ICONICS will provide you with a standard interface to allow you to harness the power of the Visualisation, Analytics and Manufacturing Intelligence software applications on the market.

This in turn will help you to:

• Increase productivity

• Automatically adhere to regulatory standards

• Reduce maintenance time

…..or any number of other benefits that these software applications can bring to your enterprise.

At Dataworks we enable the perfect hybrid of configurable off the shelf toolsets, such as ICONICS, and custom software development to deliver innovative solutions to match your specific business process requirements. This ensures we are the best at what we do.

If you would like to discuss how we can help you to use the ICONCS Moulding Machine OPC Server to deliver real benefits to your business call us today on 051 878555 or email info@dataworks.ie to arrange an appointment.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net