Industrial PC provides flexible, expandable machine control without IT intervention

“The fun part of my job is I get to be that kid with a 10-million-piece box of LEGO blocks,” says Troy Wilson, laser product manager of table products at Cincinnati (CI), a metal fabrication equipment manufacturer that’s been around more than 125 years. Today’s LEGO blocks for CI include the components that go into high-performance machines for bending, shearing, laser cutting and more, and the rapid expansion of the laser market, in particular, has changed machine development timelines, processes and core functionalities. In 2023, CI launched the CLX, a fiber laser cutting machine (Figure 1). With the help of Beckhoff Automation, the machine builder redefined machine design at the company to build a system that was flexible and adaptable to meet the future market needs.

 

CI started in 1898 building shapers and added press brakes and shears to the mix in the 1920s. All these products were used extensively during both World War I and World War II to support the U.S. war effort. The shaper dropped from the product mix in the late 1960s, which is when the powdered metal compacting press came into play to serve the automotive market.

 

 

 

“That development timeline, the change to fiber lasers and, quite frankly, the rate at which those changes occurred since the advent of fiber were big factors that pushed us toward a company like Beckhoff and PC-based control,” Wilson says. With CO₂ technology, he says, the industry would see marginal increases in performance and functionality every three years or so. “It’s a fair statement to say in the fiber laser industry, you’re seeing significant changes in performance every six to 18 months. That’s fast.”

 

CI’s U.S. manufacturing customers typically fit into three buckets: original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that make their own products; contract manufacturers, which are hired to make parts for an OEM or end user; and a hybrid or contract manufacturers that have specialized in a particular market. These customers work with a range of material thicknesses to build many different types of parts, such as router boxes, refrigerators, washing machines, trucks, cars, bridge mechanisms and towers. “The potential applications run the gamut, and different configurations of these machines are designed to apply to those different industries,” Wilson says. “It’s a very dynamic industry and keeping up with our customers’ needs is a tall order.”

 

 

Several different factors are contributing to the rapid expansion and adoption of new technologies in the laser cutting machine world. “The power of the fiber laser itself is a big one. Power keeps increasing. On these high-power lasers, you literally have to worry about the laser itself potentially eating the machine it’s bolted to. It’s got so much energy, so that’s an issue,” Wilson says.

 

Another factor in the equation is the available manpower. With a large chunk of industry experts and key company leadership retiring during and since the pandemic, middle management and others were elevated to fill those missing roles, leaving the floor machine operators in need of new hires. The pandemic created some of the workforce issues, Wilson says, but the trend has continued. “The manpower pool that was available, even today, is very limited,” he adds. “So as a machine manufacturer, we have to look at how you run that machine. Can a person with almost no technical ability run a very technical machine?”

 

When CI originally moved into building machines for the fiber cutting process from CO₂ lasers, it modified the original design to support the fiber cutting process. “We had not fundamentally changed the bed of the machine,” Wilson says, even though the two cutting processes are quite different.

 

On a CO₂ laser, a beam travels in an open environment within the enclosed machine, and bounces off a series of mirrors, very much like how a telescope bounces light, Wilson explains. The precision in which those mirrors are mounted and the alignment between them are key, he adds, as the mirrors are continuously moving. “That’s why they are called flying optic machines, because the optics were physically moving closer and further apart in the X and Y and the Z axis as the machine ran around parts,” Wilson says.

 

The rigid frame and gantry and the mounting mechanisms for all of those optics and mirrors also need to operate in a robust industrial environment. “The design required for a CO₂ laser machine to handle that is very different from a fiber optic machine, where the beam is traveling down a fiber optic cable that’s the width of a human hair,” he adds.

 

 

With the design of the CLX Fiber Laser System, CI redesigned a new machine from the ground up. “Let’s assume CO₂ never existed, and we’re going to build this system to do what it needs to do,” Wilson says.

 

The development of the CLX started pre-COVID in 2018, and the pandemic did slow down development a bit, particularly with validation and endurance testing. “When you build a new machine from the ground up, everything has to work just right. The physic and math and CAD models are great, and they get you most of the way there, but, at the end of the day, you’ve got to fire the thing up and you push it and try to break it, and you keep trying to break it until you can’t break it anymore,” Wilson says. “There are surprising things that someone would do to a machine, and I see it near monthly. And you have to ask, ‘They did what? Why would they do that?’ That’s why you have rigorous testing. That’s why you do beta machines.”

 

The alpha models are built and tested in-house. “We actually use our own manufacturing facility as a guinea pig,” Wilson says. “Our operators, they’re not too far off from operators in any other fabrication facility.” From there, Wilson says, it’s important to test beta machines with actual customers, ideally a strong customer that you have a long-term relationship with, Wilson says. “You need to be clear with them. A beta machine is likely going to break. It’s going to have issues and you learn from those,” he adds.

 

 

While nobody is lights out yet, the current design and continual machine developments are founded on flexibility and its future automation. “Part of the reason we went with Beckhoff is the functionality EtherCAT provides, the expandability, the block nature of how the logic works,” Wilson says. New systems can be added virtually with plug-and-play, as the EtherCAT network communicates with new devices with a simple software update. “What would take six months to two years to develop boards now takes days and weeks. That is absolutely critical in today’s environment,” Wilson says.

 

EtherCAT delivers free selection of network topology, and a single network can handle 65,535 nodes. As an open protocol, Beckhoff says it simplifies connection to other industrial communication options. Beckhoff offers bus couplers and gateways to more than 30 protocols, such as EtherNet/IP, Profinet and IO-Link. The CLX also uses TwinSAFE to add functional safety in the same network and I/O segment as non-safety equipment.

 

 

Before the CLX machine, CI often spent a lot of design time engineering around obsolescence and components that were no longer available. “Fundamentally, we don’t have to think about that anymore. That’s Beckhoff’s job, and they’re very good at it,” Wilson says. “They may have to change an entire component inside their industrial PC or their I/O block. It doesn’t matter because what they give us will function exactly the way we need it to function,” Wilson says. “From our perspective, the functionality on the machine doesn’t change, and we can continue to develop performance enhancements for the machine.”

 

Beckhoff has designed the C6030 ultra-compact industrial PC (IPC) specifically to combine functionality for everything from programmable logic control (PLC), motion control and robotics to human-machine interface (HMI), analytics and more in one piece of hardware. “One of the biggest problems we have had as machine tool builders is the second you tell a customer that there’s a PC inside the machine driving it, there’s a guy in the back room in the IT department that pokes his head in,” Wilson says. IT wants virus protection and security measures the minute they hear IPC. “It’s not really a PC; it’s a controller,” Wilson says. “The way Beckhoff controls that PC and the way it works in the system, we really don’t have to deal with that anymore, so that’s been huge.”

 

Although PC-based control has been in the industry for almost 40 years, some might still think the hardware is beholden to old versions of Windows or other operating systems, but that’s far from the case with IPCs. “The control software operates independently from the operating system (OS), and, in our case, we can just as easily use Windows, our own TwinCAT/BSD or Linux, for example,” says Paxton Shantz, digital manufacturing industry manager at Beckhoff. “With readily available hardware that is going to be expandable almost indefinitely, the components we’re sourcing today won’t require you to completely re-engineer your machines later. We can support that same software well into the future even if you move to the next hardware generation multiple times.”

 

As a universal engineering and runtime platform, TwinCAT 3 automation software ensures that future-proof scalability. From IEC 61131-3 languages with their object-oriented extensions to custom and predefined function blocks to computer science standards, engineers program in the languages that best fit the application with TwinCAT’s integration into Microsoft Visual Studio.

 

“Being able to use object-oriented programming in TwinCAT made it so much easier to get going with our next generation of code,” says Andrew Franxman, electrical design engineer at Cincinnati. “We also use the PLC Library, CNC package and automation device specification (ADS) communication, which is how we connect with our higher-level software. TwinCAT offers the flexibility to use different programming languages, so we can work in structured text and other contemporary languages, including computer science standards.”

 

Beckhoff is also working with CI on a version control solution for all of the machine types built into the TwinCAT manager. “Historically, you might have individual files for each machine that was in the field. The development that we’re doing is to create just one master file, so you can install that on any CLX out there and based on the hardware configuration on that machine, it will know what software modules within that master file need to be activated and running,” Shantz says. In addition to shortening commissioning, if you happen to find a bug, you can change it in one place and redeploy that fix to all the machines.

 

 

 

CI is also trying to generate a similar look and feel between different types of machines, so a press brake or a laser cutter have a similar operator experience. “It’s simple to teach a guy how to run a laser and then take the same guy and teach him how to run a press brake because the functions are in similar areas. It’s very simple and graphically driven,” Wilson says. “The goal is really to find ways to simplify their experience and have all the heavy lifting done by the HMI software and the PLC software behind the scenes.”

 

The next step for HMIs on the CLX is for the machines to self-diagnose issues with equipment or production quality. Downtime for laser machines is becoming more costly, as machines run faster, and fewer operators produce increased capacity. “Where maybe a laser was feeding five or six press brakes and welding on down the line, today it’s maybe only feeding one or two,” Wilson says. The ability of machines to self-diagnose problems is key, and even more importantly, when it’s running lights out in an automated cell, it can identify an issue, continue to run at a reduced capacity and still make parts. It sends out emails to alert personnel and raises the flag, saying it needs some help. “That is a giant jump forward technologically,” Wilson says.

 

As an example of where CI is headed with lights out operations and maintenance monitoring, the machine uses an automatic nozzle changer (ANC). The copper nozzle is the piece through which the laser beam travels and is the transition point between the beam and the cutting process. “The nozzle changers really help address customer requirements in the advent of running unattended,” Wilson says, in combination with high-mix parts manufacturing. It could be a single nozzle or a double, pumping nitrogen, oxygen or a mix of gases between nitrogen and oxygen, high pressure and more. Operators used to manually change nozzles, but the ANC automates this process.

 

It also plays a role in inventory management. In the past, operators could set up a laser machine to produce thousands of one part, running for days and stockpiling large inventories. “The cost of that and the sheer volume of money that’s wrapped up in one product is untenable in today’s environment,” Wilson says. “Where you used to make 1,000 parts a month, now you’re maybe making 10 a day, and you’re feeding that line more of a just-in-time level of output.”

 

For that varying product, the CLX machine will automatically determine the right nozzle depending on thickness, material and what is needed downstream and will automatically change to the correct nozzle. “The other advantage is there’s a lot of equipment and technology that we can add via EtherCAT, to look at what’s going on in the cutting process and realize we’re potentially having an edge degradation problem. If the nozzle gets damaged to the point where the assist gas is not coming out in the right cone shape, you may see degradation and edge quality moving in X or Y,” Wilson says. Modern machines can now sense that degradation and automatically replace the nozzle, clean it or recalibrate it and go back to work. “It’s really all about being able to change equipment and materials on the fly very quickly,” Wilson says.

 

Maintenance extends much further than the nozzles and will continue to grow in the future. “The cameras that we’re working on right now are part of active vision systems that monitor the whole machine, and when there’s a fault or an error, it’s event logging the video, all that data that was gathered, all the key components of the machine, it’s all being logged. Think of it like a black box recorder in an airliner,” Wilson says. Maintenance operators can easily determine exactly what went wrong and when.

 

The vision technology works hand-in-hand with the diagnostics in EtherCAT. Meanwhile, the CLX provides functional safety via system-integrated Safety over EtherCAT (FSoE) technology, a “black channel” solution that communicates safety data over the standard network. “In the old days, all the safety interlock components tended to be in a series, because the circuits were so expensive to make. Almost everything that’s done now on the Beckhoff side, essentially home-runs every interlock and safety circuit through the fieldbus, without having to hardwire every safety device back to the controller. So you know exactly what individual event happened.” Prior to that, it could take days to isolate an incident and know exactly what happened.

 

Machine monitoring and maintenance services are a growing business objective for CI. Given the data about how many rotations, for example, a part has made, CI can mathematically determine maintenance needs and apply those in a screen within the HMI. “Whatever the limitation of that particular component, we can link that to a maintenance item, including vibration sensors that are monitoring gearboxes and motors that can tell us vibrations are increasing,” Wilson says. “Most of it right now is control-based and stays at the control level, but the industry is driving toward feeding all that to cloud-based systems where the service manager or vendors’ services teams are scheduling service based on the data they’re getting from actively running machines.”

 

The big hold-up to advancing that technology right now, considering the requisite internet and Wi-Fi connectivity, is security. “Remember, I was talking earlier about those IT guys. The second you tell an IT guy that the machine could talk to somebody outside of their building, he starts sweating. So the technology that can help isolate that and safely communicate how their business is running outside the factory walls, I think is really the next advancement   we’re going to see in our industry,” Wilson says.

 

CI will continue to expand and iterate on the CLX machine with a newer version expected in late 2025. For the future, CI is also working on robotics in the press brake side and on the laser side. “The next big connection in my mind is the handoff between the two machine types, whether that’s using AGVs, whether it’s using conveyor systems, whether it’s going into a tower system, then that tower system has brake assemblies with robotics further down that tower like a warehouse environment. Those parts are delivered via the towers to the next operation and out they go. All of that is what’s coming,” Wilson says. “For us, it’s simply another EtherCAT connection to another module that’s going to make it all work.”