Pressing plants
Production of structural body parts from sheet metal coils
Tandem press lines
Press shops use highly dynamic presses to mould blanks into precise body and structural parts. There are presses, conveyor lines and industrial robots with a high degree of automation and tightly synchronised process windows. Testing the interaction of these systems is therefore a key requirement for the virtual commissioning (VIBN) of press lines. For conveyor technology, the WinMOD-SIMLINE system offers a wide range of roller conveyors, chain conveyors, rotary, lifting and travelling carriages as 3D elements. For the associated drive technology, there are virtual device libraries that simulate the control-relevant behaviour. Many different 3D robot libraries and 3D gantry systems are available for feeding and removal by robots or transfer axes.
The virtual body parts and coils run over the 3D belts and are captured with contour accuracy by 3D sensors and loaded into the presses using robots or transfer axes.
For the VIBN, the individual controllers are then connected to the WinMOD system via fieldbus and the virtual devices are wired to the PLC signals. In this way, the entire material flow in press lines can be put into virtual operation in real time.
Pressing and material processes
When it comes to the actual pressing and material processes, the focus is of course on completely different processes such as cold and hot forming or the deep drawing behaviour in the individual press stations. WinMOD is not a system for carrying out an FEM-based forming simulation, as there are special tools for this which have completely different requirements as offline simulations. However, you can integrate the results, i.e. press functions or data sets of the travel curves, into WinMOD. The real-time simulation gives you realistic press times and allows you to test their influence on the overall system, for example.
For the 3D visualisation of your presses, you can import their 3D CAD data and edit it in the WinMOD-SIMLINE 3D editor and link the moving parts with the online axis values. For the thermal processes, you again use elements from the WinMOD libraries. These are then virtual pumps, valves, heating elements, pressure vessels and temperature sensors, which you combine into controlled systems and which then exchange their values and states with the control system, just like in reality.
