A whole series of Nord geared motors have been installed to drive a chain conveyor belt system in Audi's advanced assembly line Ingolstadt,where the doors for the Audi A4 and A5 are produced.Further along the assembly line, sparks fly where the welding robots do their work. The article being produced slowly takes shape: doors for Audi's A4 and A5 models.

The parts are routed along a chain conveyor belt system powered by Nord drives. This branches into loading and unloading sections, which convey the vehicle component containers from work station to station.

If an error occurs in an inverter, the error message is directly sent to the master control via Interbus and displayed on the operating panel, to request manual intervention.

The chain conveyor belt and the rotary units for direction changes are controlled by almost 400 of Nord's decentralised field I/O modules. These were specified as they are optimally suited for decentralised operation and are particularly service-friendly. Each node consists of a Nord SK 300E frequency inverter drive with an I/O unit that has a repair switch and M12 connector components for connecting with process sensors and actuators. The motor is connected to the field I/O module using Harting connectors, so that it — and the inverter drive — can be replaced quickly if necessary. The field I/O modules communicate with the master controller via Interbus. The inputs of the field I/O modules enable, amongst other things, remote reading of the proximity switches for optical position monitoring of the containers.

Date:Jan. 19, 2009