Pat's Corner - Look Ahead

Have you ever been driving a car around 70 mph (maybe even tailgating the car in front of you) only to find out that you had to SLAM on the brakes to keep from rear ending the car.  How often has it been because the car ahead of the person in front of you dropped his coffee in his lap and stopped abruptly causing a chain reaction?  What, that’s never happened to you?  At least imagine that it has for a moment, wouldn’t it be far better to not only be monitoring the car in front of you, but also the car in front him/her?  I can’t give you that power while you’re driving, but I can give you that power with Motor Roller conveyors because ConveyLinx does that and so much more!

Look Ahead Slow Down is a feature that can be enabled via EasyRoll and is relatively simple to setup, but just in case I’ll show you how.  Some good applications for such a feature would be for high speed zoned accumulation or decline conveyor where you need to make sure that the product doesn't slide after stopping due to the force of stopping so fast.
 

While in EasyRoll hit the F2 key to get to the Advanced Dialog.  Then select the “Look Ahead & Timing” tab at which point you should see something like the image on the left.  Notice I’m only showing the settings for the Upstream zone, but the downstream zone is also available.  Your  two selections available are the “Slow Down Speed’ which is in the form of a

percentage and the “Fast Release Time” which is based on time. So how do we set this up?  First, you must determine and set your desired roller speed which is available on the main page of EasyRoll.  Then, you click the box for “Slow Down Speed” and set a percentage of the speed you want to slow down to once the downstream zone of the downstream zone is accumulating.  Let’s just say we set it to 50% and the actual roller speed is set to 80% on the main screen.  Now, once the zone monitors two zones ahead and notices product is present and accumulating then the zone will “Slow Down Speed” of 50% which will slow from 80% to 40%.  Make sense? Pretty cool aye, kind of like an automatic 2 speed ZPA solution.  

So, what is the “Fast Release Time” all about.  Let’s just say that the downstream zone starts to release and it releases at full speed, but because that downstream zone is full and running when the upstream zone releases it will release at 50% of 100% speed.  With “Fast Release Time” you can give a time between 0-5 seconds to release that zone at full speed and after the time elapses hopefully the downstream box is clear so it will continue at full speed.  

Using just the “Slow Down Speed” will give you maximum control over your zones at the cost of losing throughput.  But, when using both of these features together you get maximum control without giving up too much of your throughput times.  As always, if you have any questions please feel free to get a hold of any of the support team at support@pulseroller.com and if you’d like a quote on ConveyLinx send us an email at sales@insightautomation.cc .

 

If you have questions or would like to see a specific Pat's Corner let us know at support@pulseroller.com , by phone at (800-764-6356) or you can find me on Google+ to discuss.