By virtue of the variety of options it offers, MoMAS provides operators and managers of extrusion plants with a flexible and effective tool which can be employed to achieve various optimisation and automation goals. Thereby the operator can himself select the degree of autonomy with which MoMAS operates. Most importantly, he can operate the extruder manually and still exploit the information of process variables acquired and supplied by MoMAS. This provision for introducing the automation in steps alleviates its application and makes it easily acceptable on the part of operating personnel.
MoMAS controls the exit temperature by suitably varying the extrusion rate automatically. It can be employed to achieve a reduction in the extrusion time per billet by employing exit temperature control in conjunction with a successive lowering of the furnace temperature. In case controlled tapered heating is possible, MoMAS can be employed to obtain constant exit temperature with control ram velocity.
MoMAS® fulfils the following tasks:
1.) It optimises extrusion by calculating optimal process inputs between successive cycles and transferring these to the PLC.
2.) It measures and displays profile temperature, extrusion force, ram velocity etc, during every cycle, and the time per billet, standard deviation and the mean temperature over the cycles.
3.) MoMAS retrieves best process inputs for an order; it automatically retrieves and uses the best inputs if the order repeats. This feature makes it possible to optimise extrusion, even with short orders (three to five billets).
Furthermore:
MoMAS® provides the extruder managers and engineers with a versatile data base for logging and analysing the process data and keeping a watch over the extruder (man and machine) and product. Production statistics in an industrial press comprising over 50.000 extrusions showed that the mean extrusion rate with MoMAS® was 6% higher than without.
MoMAS® is fully operational in the following countries: Germany, USA, Sweden, Italy and Australia. Major aluminium producers are among the user of this state of art aluminium extrusion control system.
