Material Handling: Flooring Production Line

Customer:

Rage Engineering & Mannington Mills, Inc.

Background:

Rage Engineering Inc. is an OEM that specializes in bulk material handling process equipment for many industries, while Everite's Tarcon control division has provided industrial control solutions to compliment and enhance the product offering for many original equipment manufacturers. Mannington Mills, Inc. is a manufacturer of residential and commercial flooring products.

Mannington committed to build a manufacturing production line to produce a new product for their industrial flooring division. Rage Engineering and Everite were awarded the contract to provide the raw material handling and process control systems.

Manufacturing Challenge:

Because the new flooring incorporated a newly designed material composition, the control system needed to be flexible to accommodate the scaling up of the prototype process to one that could be used for production quantities. The flooring production line also needed to incorporate the latest pneumatic and hydraulic transportation and weighing technologies, as well as, a sophisticated network of operator's terminals to facilitate manufacturing and to monitor the new flooring process.

Solution:

The control design consisted of a network of Modicon plc's and Nematron color monitors to provide high speed and flexibility needed to incorporate the weighing systems and the mixer process controls. A minimum of 8 weighing systems were required to accurately measure the dry and liquid ingredients for the two stage process. The multiple 800hp mixers required variable speed motor control, as well as, temperature, pressure and amperage monitoring of the process, to enable the specialized process control scheme.

Everite fosters long term working relationships with OEM's to enable our engineering teams establish a working knowledge of the intricacies of each company's equipment and their needs.