Automatic sorting equipment not only brings higher efficiency, but also reduces costs to a greater extent. With the increase in production line speed, quality and quality enhancement, has also been the sorting equipment such as sorting machine, as the production of key equipment.

Now the domestic beer production line general speed requirements for 28,000 bottles / hour or 36,000 bottles / hour, the increase in production speed, the need for linear EBI, the automatic sorting machine puts forward new requirements, the ability to receive and process signals to enhance; need to use the encoder to the bottle for the whole tracking and positioning, so the requirements of the automatic sorting machine to read the encoder value must be rapid and accurate. The use of Siemens and Omron PLC control found that the real-time is relatively poor, the use of ladder diagrams to program such a control program is more complex. In the face of these special control requirements, the advantages of CAS come to the fore, which can be programmed using high-level languages such as C. The TPU function can solve the problem of lagging signal reception and reading encoder is not timely enough, in addition to the use of PVI communication can be easily realized with the help of industrial Ethernet and the host computer VB program communication.

The automatic sorting machine needs to record the signals returned by the image processor, make statistical analysis of various data and information, and provide them to the host computer; track and locate the bottles, locate the unqualified products sorted, and accurately reject the unqualified bottles when it reaches the position of the rejection device, and the rejection rate of the bottles can not be higher than 5% of the bottle reversal rate. The automatic sorting machine is stable and reliable, and can be started smoothly after sudden power down and power up again.

Design program

The inspection machine realizes all-round sorting of beer bottles and sends the sorting result information to the automatic sorting system, which analyzes and summarizes the received information and controls the single-segment or multi-segment rejector to reject the unqualified bottles. The sorting system is divided into six major sorting modules: bottle inlet sorting module, sidewall sorting module 1 bottle mouth sorting module, bottle bottom sorting module, sidewall sorting module 2, residual liquid sorting module.

Sorting function

1 Incoming bottle sorting module: sorting shaped bottles or seriously damaged bottles to prevent them from entering the empty bottle sorting machine system and causing damage to the machine.

2 Side wall sorting module 1: sorting whether the bottle wall has stains or serious damage.

3 Bottle mouth sorting module: mainly sorts whether the bottle mouth is damaged or stained.

4 Bottom sorting module: mainly sorting whether there is stain on the bottom of the bottle.

5 Side-wall sorting module 2: bottles are rotated 90 degrees through the bottle clamping belt to carry out the second side-wall sorting, which ensures that there is no dead spot in the bottle wall sorting.

6 Residual liquid sorting module: mainly sort whether there is residual liquid in the bottle.

Working Principle

Through the special design of the LED light source to light, CCD camera to take pictures, the photo information will be taken to the image processor system, the image processor to process and analyze the photo, determine whether the photo taken is qualified, and will be qualified to send out the signal to the automatic sorting machine.

The working principle of residual liquid sorting is:

Adopt high-frequency transmitter to send out high-frequency signal, when the bottle with residual liquid passes through this sorting module, it causes high-frequency signal fluctuation, and through the fluctuation of the judgment signal, it sends out the information of the judged unqualified bottle to the automatic sorting machine.

The function of the detecting machine is:

The automatic sorting scale tracks the bottles on the non-pressure control link and collects the information from the image processing, summarizes and analyzes it, gives the result to the bottles, and rejects the unqualified products when the bottles reach the rejector. The automatic sorting machine requires stable performance, compact structure, reliable work, stronger functions, more convenient debugging and maintenance, the CAS automatic sorting machine is used as the bottom control unit of the system because of both the above advantages.

Sorting and control

(1) Photoelectric sorting position distribution

(2) The idea of control

Bottles running in the chainway first triggered by the front sidewall photoelectric, with a structure array A to record its current encoder value, and the front wall of the sorting of good and bad information. The bottle mouth photoelectric trigger records the current encoder value, and then subtracts the current encoder value from the pulse distance between the bottle mouth photoelectric to the front wall photoelectric REMOVE1, and then searches for the value of the encoder in the array of structures of the front side wall in a tolerance range of △ (i.e., the range of REMOVE1 ± △), and then finds the good and bad information about the sorting of the front wall of this bottle, and then copies it into the array of structures at the mouth of the bottle and Record the good and bad information about the sorting of the bottle's mouth. If this bottle is not found in the array of front sidewall structures, it is considered to be an extra bottle, which may be a bottle inserted by sliding too large or by human beings, and the bottle is recorded as a failed bottle. Similarly, the bottom of the bottle photoelectric trigger to check the bottle mouth of the structure of the body array, the back wall photoelectric trigger to check the bottom of the bottle structure of the body array, reject the photoelectric trigger to check the back wall structure of the body array. When it comes to the array of structures of rejected photoelectricity, the current photoelectric trigger encoder value and all the information of front wall, bottle mouth, bottle bottom and back wall sorting are collected.

The advantages of the control idea are:

1) Use the moment of each photoelectric trigger to correct the sliding of bottles on the chain path within the distance from the last photoelectric trigger to this photoelectric trigger, so as to make their positioning more accurate;

2) The sorting of all modules is independent, making it easy to separate each module for independent operation. Any one function block can be closed without affecting the sorting of other modules;

(3) Solve the problem of misplaced signals caused by bottles due to multiple or fewer bottles in the sorting process.

Progress of system performance design

With the development of technology, beer companies production line speed is constantly improving, from the original 18,000 bottles / hour to 28,000 bottles / hour, 36,000 bottles / hour, 42,000 bottles / hour. The rotary EBI such as American Fidelity can no longer meet the speed requirements, and the linear EBI came into being.

A CPU (CP476) in the CAS system is selected, which has TPU (time processor) with input recognition/input edge triggered counter, output comparator, pulse width modulation and other functions. With a simple configuration, its function blocks can be called in the program to achieve accurate tracking of the encoder and rapid response to signals sent by photoelectric triggering.

The communication program between the CAS automatic checkweigher and the upper computer is relatively simple to write, and it only updates and generates a communication operation to update the data of the upper computer when the data of the automatic sorting machine statistics changes, saving the CPU resources of the upper computer as much as possible, and facilitating the operation of image processing information.