Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System for Machines used for Thermal Processing of Materials

A supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system has been developed for three machines used for the thermal processing of materials: a hot wire cutter, an induction heater and a welding test stand. The cutter uses a transformer with adjustable voltage between 20 V and 32 V, and current of 8 A, measuring the temperature of the wire with thermal expansion. The heater uses a 24 V, 15 A source, and a type K thermocouple embedded in the sample in order to measure temperature. In welding, a temperature control system was implemented for the sample using type K thermocouple and a cooling fan using a 12 V and 20 A source. The SCADA system consists of a PLC and a PC with a graphical interface which serves to select the process to be worked on as it displays the thermal history of the monitored object. The supervisory system uses a PC with a 32-bit Windows 7 operating system and an OPC software package running on the academic LabVIEW platform. It was designed to use a single human-machine interface for different thermal processes. This paper describes the important components of the system, including its architecture, software development and performance testing.