PC-PLC Steering of a sheet feeder

Abstract

The RXstation was a project that had already been started two years before we arrived, after The Industrial Science and Technology Department of The Erasmus Hogeschool Brussel and Indutec (Association of the Industrial Engineering Schools of the Brussels-Capital Region) made a contract to create a prototype of a machine for the Company A-Ronne Imavid. The purpose of the contract was to create a machine for digitalizing xrays, specifically mammograms.

Nowadays, the process of digitalizing xrays is made manually by an operator, who puts the xrays in the scanner one by one. This fact makes the process itself very slow. Therefore, one of the purposes of the project was to build a machine which would make the digitalizing process completely automatic, thereby, improving the process. All this has become a need due to the high number of mammograms that are taken every year due to routine medical revisions.

The purpose of this project, PC PLC Steering of a sheet feeder, was to automate and control the whole process of the sheet feeder, a device for digitalizing X rays. As well as an automatic system, a user interface that let the user control the system in an easy way was also programmed.
It was also intended that the document itself was to be helpful for next year students so that they could benefit from the development that was done.


I could divide my work in two different but related areas.

Control of the prototype. This task included the programming of the PLC and choosing, installing and calibrating the sensors and actuators. The PLC program was responsible for all the actions that are carried out by the machine.

Programming a User Interface. This program interacted with the PLC program and mastered it. With it, we gave a simple way of handling the process for a non skilled user.

As a consequence of these two programs, we had to work in the communication between them.

Some parts of the program simulated the working of two important devices in the sheet feeder: the scanner and the barcode reader. As we did not have these elements, they were simulated so that the program can be used when having them with slight adjustments.

Date of Award	15 Jun 2004
Original language	English
Supervisor	Peter Van Den Bossche (Jury) & Erik D'hollander (Promotor)