Farmers, growers, auction sellers en transporters are using special hampers for transportation of flowers and plants, the so called pile carriers. On busy days there may be more than 11.000 products delivered at the Flower auction in Aalsmeer. The empty pile carriers return to a central location after the auction and distribution of these products where they will be prepared for further transportation with electro pullers. Van den Akker Electric Engineering from Rosmalen developed the functionality and the operation of this mechanisation station 023, and build the line in cooperation with a machine factory. Director Arno van den Akker invited us for a demonstration and showed us the details, including the SEW-tractions supplied by Vector.
Van den Akker Electric Engineering
Immediately after his bachelor degree in process control Arno van den Akker founded in februari 1999 his own one man company. During the first years he took care of small (automation) projects with his bus. In 2000 he made a company continuation with the former E.T.I.B. Van den Boogaard. Besides knowledge and experience he also took over five employees. By concentrating more on industrial automation, the original activities house construction and utilities slowly disappeared. Meanwhile the company has grown to a full engineering company with 20 motivated employees who did everything possible to ”create a good product” in consultation with the client. In many cases Van den Akker Electric Engineering goes further where others are stopping. The company delivers complete control systems, including hardware, electronics and software. Moreover they now have required all the knowledge of PLS's, PC's, MMI, DCS, SCADA, robots and servo techniques. Therefore Van den Akker is capable to handle and coordinate complete installations (turn-key), from wiring activities up to the control room, both in the Netherlands as in the rest of the world.
The Namechanisation station 023 at the flower auction in Aalsmeer is a typical example of a project, where mechanics, electronics, control and software come and work together. For this project manager Michael Ruijs was responsible as project leader.
Namechanisation station 023
On the first floor the empty pile carriers are being supplied with a hanging transport system with mechanical claws. With three elevators the pile carriers are transported downwards because the namechanisation is located on the ground floor. At this point the installation of Van den Akker Electric Engineering takes over. During the demonstration Arno tells us about some difficult tasks during the engineering process, like automatic coupling, clogging caused by paper, ducktape, rope etc. and damaged pile carriers. To get the process flow running without faults there was build a pilot project at Van den Akker Electric Engineering with an outgoing line. All software was being simulated and tested before they began to build the hardware. The pile carriers are being removed transverse from the elevators with transport lanes. This occurs with the help of 12 SEW motor reductors for the clasping and 1 motor reductor for the transport itself. Hereafter starts the removal in the length direction with an asynchrone SEW servo motor. After about 10 meters each pile carrier will be moved transverse to one of the 6 outgoing lanes, or transported further if the pile carrier is of the “Danish“ type (these have other dimentions). The transverse removal consists of a chain with barges which are also driven by a SEW motor reductor. After positioning in one of the outgoing lanes the pile carrier is coupled automaticly to the proceeding carrier and will be pushed forwards one position. The removal transport system is driven step by step with SEW motor reductors. If one lane is completely filled, the coupled pile carriers are taken out by an electro pusher. Besides empty pile carriers there are also carriers being transported with empty buckets (for flowers) and boxes. Each lane has a capacity of around 320 carriers in one hour. Van den Akker had choosen to control the SEW motor reductors with SEW-MOVITRAC® frequency controllers and SEW-MOVITRAC® application controllers with the IPOSplus® controlling software. To control the installation on site, to read (error) messages and for possible manual control, a touch-screen panel was installed. In the control room (which was located 2 kilometres further away) a complete schematic is shown of all (transport) systems, including the actual state of the Namechanisation station (filled lanes, errors etc.). The shuttle movement takes about 800 meters above the road where the filled pile carriers are being supplied to the auction area with the buyers and returned empty again.
Van den Akker and Vector
Arno van den Akker is very proud of the gained result at the flower auction. He is also very satisfied with the cooperation with Vector. His choise for a good product and a good relationship becomes even stronger by recognising their own working method: ”Dynamic, Fast, Service and Quality”. Especially the quality of the SEW products is being reinforced by the speed and the flexibility of the own assembly. The MOVIDRIVE® controllers are moreover universal for synchronous, asynchronous and servo, which makes it easier for standardisation. Arno van de Akker sees in the near future good possibilities for Vision systems and robots. Besides that he works closely together with the college in Den Bosch and in Utrecht to develop mutual projects.
Download here this article in pdf format (Dutch).
(Source: Vector Aadrijf Magazine, number 82, september 2004)