An industrial automation machine integrator contacted us for a web guide upgrade for one of their customers.
Fremont Automation is a machine integrator with experience in industrial automation. They contacted us for a web guide upgrade requirement on a rebuild they were doing for a customer. This involved an upgrade on an existing web guide that their customer had acquired from Roll-2-Roll Technologies a year and a half before, and their customer wanted to keep the web guide system since they had a good experience with it.
“This is what I generally expect from a supplier for integration projects, good support, good documentation, good product. It is a company I would use for web guiding in future integration projects.”
Initially, the customer had a paper and thin steel lamination process that required a guiding system for the paper web. The paper web would be glued onto the steel strip. When their customer initially contacted us the paper web had no guiding system. The process involved having an operator looking at the web and if the web was out of place they would lose about 120 to 150 ft of steel before they could stop the line and correct he position of the paper web. Also, the customer had issues at roll changes because of waster time in dialing in the machine after loading the roll of web material. The steel strip was 3.4" to 5" wide with a 0.014" thickness and the line was running at 120 to 150 fpm. The web guide system selected was a 10" compact web guiding system which could be installed very easily and could be placed in operation in seconds as it is a plug and play web guide system like most of the Roll-2-Roll® Web Guides.
When the converter decided to upgrade their converting line a year later, they approached Fremont Automation for the rebuild. It was at that time that Fremont Automation contacted us to help integrate the current web guide with their automation system in the rebuild. For this we provided a new controller with Ethernet communication, an actuator and a WPS 221 IR for edge guiding. This sensor provides a sensor range of 8.7 inches with .0067 mm resolution across the entire range.
As Jacob Benes, Controls Engineer for Fremont Automation explained, they had limited knowledge with web guiding systems and on the request of their customer wanted to maintain the same guide mechanism. The upgrade had features that made Roll-2-Roll products desirable. The wider available wider sensor with a low profile eliminated the physical repositioning of the sensor for changes in web edge position. The Ethernet communications option on the controller allowed for the operator interface to be part of the main panel of the converting machine, eliminating the need to access the web guide.
Aside from the technological benefit of the products, they were quite satisfied with service as they considered it very responsive and knowledgeable. At the end he indicated that they would recommend the product and service because it works
"We recommend the product and service because it works."