Automation Fair 2021- Houston

After 2 years of no face-to-face events, it was fantastic to get the opportunity to go to Houston for Automation Fair 2021!

This year’s Automation Fair took place November 10-11 in Houston, TX featuring everything you love - from interactive sessions to industry-centric panel discussions, and our signature exciting show floor showcasing the latest innovations and solutions from Rockwell Automation and members of our PartnerNetwork™.

The Innovations booth was once again heavily dominated by Emulate3D. The main event for the Innovations booth was the interactive VR egg chair tours and a tunnel walk-through of the Milwaukee Operations 100C Contactor Line.

The egg chair tours were upgraded from two years previous and included tours of newer bigger models!

Life Science Demonstration- In this tour customers were toured around a simulation model of an idealized vaccine production facility.

Milwaukee Contactor Line - Customers were guided around the main areas of this Digital Twin of a real manufacturing line creating contactors, that is based near the Rockwell Headquarters in Milwaukee.

Canning Model - This model features interactive HMIs which are connected to real PLCs. The tour operator can interact with the HMI to interrupt production and restart it.

---

Milwaukee Operations 100C Contactor Line Experience

The main story of the Innovations booth was based around the successful re-onshoring of the Milwaukee Contactor Line. The contactors were originally being manufactured in the USA by hand, but due to labour costs, the assembly of the units was relocated to China.

Rockwell Automation combined solutions from its wide product range and partners to create a fully automated assembly line. The Digital Twin was created using Emulate3D virtual commissioning software for a high resolution, accurate base model. The Digital Twin has been used to commission plant and plant additions before they exist and, allow engineers, key stakeholders, and personal to access the model in virtual reality for lifelike likeness. The Digital Twin can also continue to be of use for post-entity operator training as it is connected to the real-life Allen-Bradley controllers.

---

---

Digital Engineering Kiosk

After passing through the tunnel customers were directed to the Digital Engineering Tri-Side Kiosk. Our booth focussed on the importance of the Digital Thread and how it can be used to accelerate innovation, maximize workforce productivity and optimize operations.

Early adopters of Digital Thread methodology are surging ahead in productivity and innovation. How? Harnessing the Digital Thread enables seamless data flow throughout the organization, which leads to improvements and benefits throughout the entire operation. Imagine collaborating in real time across the value chain, validating new lines and processes virtually, simplifying data science and increasing your manufacturing flexibility. Stop imagining and make the Digital Thread your new reality.

The Digital Thread is essentially creating a workflow that allows data to seamlessly transfer from initial design to final product and then even further into the product lifecycle. This seamless flow of data accelerates time to market and allows engineers to focus on engineering.

Machine and Equipment Design

Onshape

One of the biggest challenges machine designers face is easily and intuitively collaborating with their colleagues in the same office and around the globe. Complex machines are often designed by numerous CAD designers all of whom have to constantly manually update their CAD and push it to each other to make sure everyone is working with the correct CAD.

Add in the fact that they will often work with other companies who do not have access to their CAD sharing system and all of a sudden maintaining everyone's CAD becomes a large part of the job.

PTC, a Rockwell Automation partner, recently acquired Onshape. Onshape is a native SaaS CAD offering. This means you can run Onshape on any computer that has an internet connection without needing an expensive workstation.

In fact, for this event, we were given the incorrect laptops but didn't have any issues as all the heavy lifting is done on the cloud. Surprisingly there is zero lag or jitter when rotating and zooming in and around large models that would normally cause CAD workstations to go into overdrive.

All Onshape documents are stored on the cloud and are therefore intrinsically always up to date and easy to access and share. You can access your CAD from any computer in the world with an internet connection without having to install any software.

As well as all documents intrinsically being up to date, Onshape makes use of versioning and branching. This allows multiple engineers to work on separate parts of the model individually and then merge them back into the main branch. You can also easily roll back to a previous version with a single click in the branch tree.

What takes Onshape to the next level is multiple users from all over the world can access the same document and make changes to it in real-time, kind of like a google doc but with industrial CAD.

This seamless sharing of data is the starting point for our Digital Thread!

Click the logo below to learn more about Onshape and create a free account.

Importing to Emulate3D

Once the CAD is finalized it can easily be shared with others by simply copying and pasting the URL to it! No more receiving assembly files with missing parts or no parts at all!

The Onshape-Emulate3D integration makes use of the document URL. To import an Onshape model into Emulate3D all you need to do is copy and paste the URL to the document into Emulate3D and click Import! This will download the latest version of the CAD directly from the Onshape Cloud and will then convert it into an Emulate3D model.

Even more smooth and seamless data sharing. What makes this even better is the joints and kinematics marked up in Onshape are read whilst the model is imported. Emulate3D will then convert these Onshape Mates to Emulate3D CAD Is The Model Aspects. Importing and reusing Kinematic markup reduces duplication of work, saves time, and ticks our Digital Thread box!

Now that the model and its kinematics are inside of Emulate3D it is ready to receive its controls.

Line Design and System Simulation

Before the detailed line design is being carried out we can carry out high-level black box layout simulations in Emulate3D, these simulations allow you to quickly see how machines will integrate when in a line.

A BlackBox component accepts material, a magical process then occurs, and it then outputs material. We can set up these magical processes to be whatever we want using QuickScript, a high-level visual block-based programming language. Each machine can have its own BlackBox component and then we can connect them all to see the overall line behaviour.

Full customization of the BlackBox processing logic allows you to create highly accurate abstract representations of complex machines, the resulting BlackBox line simulation results are suitable to identify bottlenecks and areas which will need further optimizations, as well as output data such as throughput and cycle time.

When the CAD is ready is can be imported into the model as described earlier and can then replace the BlackBoxes. Further parametric studies can then be run to optimize the system and identify bottlenecks.

Automation Design and Virtual Commissioning

Virtual Commissioning

Once the design is hardened and finalized we can then carry out Virtual Commissioning. We can use the imported Onshape model with its imported kinematics. We then have the option to connect to either an emulated PLC or a real PLC. For the tradeshow, we showcased connecting to an emulated PLC with Logix 5000. this means you can carry out controls testing without any hardware!

Load the real PLC code that you would use to control the real machine. You won't need to make any changes to this code to run the Emulate3D Digital Twin.

Once you have connected the PLC to the machine, import the tags directly from the PLC. Then connect the PLC tags to their relevant Emulate3D properties/tags, these will mostly be autogenerated by the aspects which were created whilst importing the model from Onshape.

All that is left to do is click Run! You have now got a Digital Twin of your machine, line, or whole warehouse, which is being controlled by the real control logic. You can use your Digital Twin to carry out Virtual Commissioning before your machines have been manufactured. Another fantastic benefit is the ability to test the controls without needing to create products that will have to be binned. Customers have reduced on-site commissioning from 2 months plus to a single week!

Logix Echo Co-simulation

New for Emulate3D 2021 is the ability to connect to the brand new Logix Echo PLC Emulator which allows Co-simulation! This emulator can run faster and slower than in real-time. This means you can run days worth of virtual commissioning in a fraction of the time.

My favourite use case for this feature is something going wrong 4 hours into a model run. Instead of resetting the model and waiting for 4 hours to get back to that point, we can fast forward to 3h 59m, thanks to Logix Echo. Then we can stop the model and play it in slow motion, we can even step a fixed time step through the model like 10ms or 100ms to help us identify the problem.