Microcomputer Control of a Printing Ink Plant

Abstract

The manufacturing of printing inks can be considered as a multi-product batch technological system. The production of more than 2000 products take place by charges with identical or similar sequence of identical procedures on the basis of the recipes containing the technological instructions. The available items of the different equipment types may be allocated to simultaneously operating parallel production lines according to the production program. The goal of the control system elaborated for the new processing area of the BUDACOLOR Paint Factory /Hungary/ is to ensure the stationary processing of high-quality products by the concept of recipe controlled sequencing and data recording for the analysis of the processing system. The control system is based on an MPC-Z80 microcomputer and involves two levels of the computer control. The process management level performs the recipe handling and production programming. On the process control level the functions of process control, operator interface and documentation are accomplished. Both control levels are executed separately and consequently by the use of the program overlay technique. The successful combination of the process management and control levels on the basis of a 8-bit microcomputer configuration can be interesting for other batch-type technologies.