Glass is one of the most adaptable materials of today. There are innumerable fields of application from sheet glass to glasses and hotplate. To produce sheet glass quartz sand is mixed with used glass. Thereby extreme attention must be paid to the purity of the grit to guarantee the quality and colouring of the end product.

Automated grit conditioning

For this SPANGLER automated a grit conditioning plant in Iran for mineral processing specialist AKW Apparate + Verfahren GmbH. The mined sand is freed from impurities in various working steps. SPANGLER planned and manufactured eight control cabinets for the load current distribution and nine control cabinets for the control of the motor outputs. For the control the plant is equipped with a PLC with decentralised periphery and can be operated via a touch panel by the operating personnel.

Challenge load current distribution

The distribution of the energy to the aggregates turned out to be especially difficult. To manage the power of 1.700kW a specialized energy distribution system is used. This busbar system provides the necessary capacities to be able to professionally distribute energy parameters of that class. For this project SPANGLER installed approximately seven tonnes of control technology in total, of which 820kg alone for copper of the busbar.

The community Beilngries has always given attention to energy and cost efficiency since the construction of the municipal waste water treatment plant. There is also value attached to machines so that they do not make any negative impression due to unnecessarily high energy consumptions.

Power supply and consumption

By reconstruction measures on particularly energy-intensive plants such as the installation of a Fuzzy aeration plant of Envicon in 2006, the efficiency could be significantly improved. Together with SPANGLER a process management system of the type FlowChief was installed which included the energy management module e-Gem to make the energy consumers transparent. Thereby not only the consumers were taken into account but also the power supply in form of a combined heat and power (CHP) plant by which the first own capacity of the plant is covered. To be able to represent the complex relationships of power supply and consumption, SPANGLER installed a comprehensive measurement technology for the energy consumption. Those feed data into the energy management system and can therefore be requested and visualised by the operator.

Using not only clean but also reasonable energy

The expenses do pay off for Beilngries as, on the one hand, the plants refinance themselves by the refund of the waste water levy and, on the other hand, the energy generation and consumption can be coupled together. Therefore, power generation phases can be combined with peak loads. As a result, less expensive power must be externally purchased and relied on. Moreover, the system contains key figures which enable an evaluation of the current energy efficiency and thus is the basis for a better utilization of the plants.

A modern vehicle consists of several thousand parts; many of them, in particular in the interior, are made of plastic. So far, every single part was manufactured on an individual machine and subsequently laminated, thus stuck together with other components. SPANGLER has now automated a plant of the technology company Koller-Group being able to do more than just laminating one specific part.

Pluggable sersor technology

The new plant is the first of its kind which can be modularly adapted to new components. Due to long retrofitting times of previous plants, SPANGLER has reconsidered the automation technology to achieve this aim. This included among other things that all connections for sensors and load technology are pluggable on the control cabinet without tools.

The first of a new type

Especially in the automotive industry it is fundamentally important to guarantee the supply chain and the delivery capability. Therefore, the plant is equipped with a failsafe PLC control. A mobile touch panel enables the operation with the intuitive user interface in the national language from every point of the plant. For this SPANGLER planned, manufactured and commissioned the first plant in the main factory of our customer in Germany. Based on the German model, the technology can be taken for the worldwide use of the plants.

In the course of the extension of the waste water treatment plant Sulaibiya for HUBER SE, a worldwide operating company in the areas of water treatment, waste water treatment and sludge treatment, SPANGLER was assigned to carry out the control technology for the screen plant and the grit and grease trap.

The screen plant consists of four screens. The screenings are discharged via a double screw conveyor. The waste water is freed from grit and fat components via four lines.

Touch protection of highest quality

The requirement of an internal division in the form of 4b type7 made special demands on the control system. This requires that the busbars of the functional units, the functional units among themselves and the output terminals of the individual units have to be assembled separately from each other. This makes the maintenance considerably easier as only the unit affected must be disconnected from the main power supply. Therefore, this unit can be maintained touch-proofed and commissioned again. The other units remain unaffected and can continue to operate during maintenance work. A complete plant standstill is therefore not the consequence if there is a failure of only one unit.

Resistant

To fulfill the sometimes adverse environmental conditions at a waste water treatment plant, the control system was equipped with a fully tinned busbar system. For an even higher operational safety the plant was planned with a PLC bypass for each drive. Therefore, the plant can continue to operate even if there is a failure of the PLC. Explosion-protected local control boxes were installed on the machines so that they can also be operated locally.