Monitoring a Foil Winder with Pepperl+Fuchs Rotary Encoder

The company ATH Automatisierung und Anlagentechnik Hameln GmbH develops, among other products, control technology for winding machines used in the most varied sectors of the foil, paper and fleece industry.

In a foil winder (Fig. 1) large reels of foil are wound up or down. During the winding of the foil mechanical movements must be tuned via the control technology of the drive motors.

To capture the positions of existing linear and rotary axes, absolute encoders are used permitting the precise indexing of positions (Fig. 2 and Fig. 3).

This precision is necessary for the high demands on the winding quality, especially with thin foils (6 µm) and high speeds (1000 m/min) in order to be able to carry out the winding process and the coil reel change.

For the control of the drive motors, the Pepperl+Fuchs singleturn and multiturn absolute encoders PVS58N-011AGR0BN-0013 and PVM58N-011AGR0BN-1213 are used.

The rotary encoder technology replaces mechanical movement capturing devices which are expensive to install. The failure liability is reduced. The reduction of the failure frequency provides a cost saving during plant operation since expensive outages can be avoided.