An aging baler at a plastic recycling company had stopped during a busy production run and we got called out to see if we could help. Soon after arriving on site it was clear that a spot of Allen Bradley MicroLogix 1200 Troubleshooting was in order, and we were more than happy to help. After connecting to the PLC and uploading the PLC program to our programming laptop (as there was no original copy of the software) we began the task of Allen Bradley MicroLogix 1200 Troubleshooting.
Although we only had the ‘raw’ and non-commented copy of the code to work with we quickly discovered that the main encoder, used to determine the position of the baler during a cycle, had lost its count value.
The issues were soon put to bed after ‘homing’ the baler and resetting the count value. The customer was then again able to resume full production and clear the backlog of recyclables which had been rapidly building up prior to our arrival.
We also made several recommendations as to how the existing controls systems could be further improved to prevent future lost production and increase reliability. The PLC software was also backed up and ‘commented’ to allow for future ease of troubleshooting, should this be required.
