Baron Blakeslee Creates a Smarter, Smaller Vapor Degreaser
AK-225 is the commercial name for a hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC)
that was banned from production and import in the United States as
of January 1, 2015. It was the key solvent used in vapor degreasing
equipment. When Honeywell first commercialized Solstice PF in March
2014, it created an opportunity for Baron-Blakeslee to design new
machinery that could take advantage of this market development.
And thus was born the Equinox EQ1.
On May 1, 2014, the South Coast Air Quality Management District
(SCAQMD) in southern California granted an exemption to Solstice PF
because, once AK-225 was phased out, there were no other choices for
vapor degreasing.
“There are a lot of parts out there that you cannot clean any other
way,” explains Patrick Oliver, international sales manager at
Baron-Blakeslee in Williamstown, West Virginia. “Water is a pretty
small molecule, but the hydrogen and oxygen atoms on adjacent water
molecules interact with one another, so a group of water molecules
act like one bigger molecule. Sometimes there are tight spaces that
water cannot get into to clean, nor out of to dry. The Solstice PF
does a good job of getting into tight capillary spaces.” A lot of
solvents are regulated, but Solstice PF is not considered to be a
volatile organic compound (VOC).
“It all stems from the Solstice PF solvent, although the Equinox
works with many other solvents, too, not just Solstice,” explains
Oliver. “The California market was driving this. When the AK-225
vapor degreasing solvent got phased out, they had to start using new
solvents. You can’t put the new solvent in an old machine because it
will evaporate too quickly. We were one of the first companies to
start designing equipment for Solstice PF. We had to redesign our
machine, which turned into the Equinox EQ1. To put one of these
machines on a benchtop, you have to squeeze a lot of components into
a pretty small box.”
Combining Control and Operator Interfaces
The old system included digital displays, push buttons, analog
temperature controllers, relays and pilot lights. Attempting to
retrofit existing degreasers to operate with Solstice PF is
generally a bandage solution, and, if the solvent is constantly
evaporating, that is costly. “This stuff boils at 66°F, and it comes
in a refrigerant cylinder,” says Oliver.
“If it’s exposed to air, it’s gone. Evaporation gets to be very
expensive. We needed automation, but we just ran out of room to put
all of the components in the little box. On the old machines, all of
the electronics were in the front. The space behind there is very
limited and restricted. There was no way to use the previously
designed hoist.”
Baron-Blakeslee found the solution to this problem in a controller
from Maple Systems, an HMI+PLC combo unit with a color touchscreen
display and three ports for plugging in I/O modules. These Maple
System unit merges the functionality of an HMI and a PLC to yield an
analog resistive touchscreen and free configuration software. It
includes Ethernet, Serial, USB host and USB client ports, as well as
high-speed counters and a ladder editor with support for IEC 61131-3
standard instruction sets. The HMC device enables data logging and
four-channel, real-time trending.
While the Maple Systems HMI+PLC combo was the primary technology
that made the Equinox work, it was Baron-Blakeslee’s Lab Kleen
equipment that was the original inspiration for the Equinox.
“We had an external, rodless air cylinder, which we controlled with
a smart relay,” explains Oliver. “You had to add an extra structure
on the side and another separate electrical enclosure for the hoist.
There was an e-stop and magnetic proximity switches. One of the real
features of the Equinox EQ1 is thermal management. You have to
control the thermal input. We redesigned the cabinet, and we put all
of the heat on one side and all of the cold on the other side. It’s
got a little compressor and a condenser and a pump. The cabinet got
wider. If we were to use the Lab Kleen hoist, that would make it
even bigger.”
Mach 1
The first Equinox had push-button control and no automation (Figure
1). “Automation is important with Solstice PF degreasing processes
because precise control of the process is essential for solvent
conservation,” says Oliver.
Figure 1:
The first Equinox had
push-button control and no automation.
Source Baron-Blakeslee
Figure 2: The
Equinox EQ1 was a
change in machine design, and has since been deployed widely
in the industry.
Source Baron-Blakeslee
“Part baskets are lowered into and out of the degreaser with speeds
below 3 ft./min. Parts are first immersed in liquid solvent, which
is filtered, and may feature ultrasonics to enhance cleaning, and
then are paused in a zone of saturated solvent vapor to permit parts
to drain and dry as condensation ceases. The dwell times in each
zone must be programmable, and different program recipes must be
stored to allow operators to process a variety of part types in
predetermined, optimized cleaning cycles.”
Baron-Blakeslee’s use of the Maple Systems controller on the EQ1 was
motivated by the fact that it had to add a programmable lift to the
Equinox for efficient, repeatable, predictable processing with the
Solstice PF solvent.
“We simply ran out of space to add extra push buttons and components
in the EQ1 package, and we discovered that the Maple Systems
controller would allow us to integrate all the features we needed
with the lift, plus many more, while maintaining the packaging
objectives of this particular product line, to be a benchtop vapor
degreaser,” explains Oliver (Figure 2).
Baron-Blakeslee switched from a Leeson motor to a Baldor DC motor in
the back of the cabinet behind the process tank of the Equinox.
“Guards go around the pulley and cable assembly to the hoist,” says
Oliver. “You look inside the cabinet, and there’s a lot of stuff in
that little box.”
When redesigning the vapor degreasing machine, Baron-Blakeslee
looked at a variety of ways to upgrade, while keeping the footprint
the same. “We looked at putting a box on top of the cabinet to hold
a touchscreen HMI,” says Oliver. “We were using Zytron analog
temperature controllers on the old model. We tried to stick within
the same dimensional envelope, but the existing control components
made it impossible to achieve that goal.”
Decades in the Making
With more than 80 years of experience in designing and building
industrial cleaning equipment, Baron-Blakeslee has been through its
share of machine iterations. “We’re a conservative company,” says
Oliver. “For us to change our controllers is not a consideration we
take lightly.” The Equinox was a change in machine design, and many
systems are now in place with our customers. It has spurred a push
to standardize much of Baron-Blakeslee’s equipment on a single
control system.
“We’re going to put the Maple Systems controller on all of the M
Series going forward,” says Oliver. “We can add material handling to
these machines. We can load the hoist to the program. The motivation
here is to standardize a control system across all of our lines.
We’ve made the decision to put this controller on everything we can.
We couldn’t have done this 10 years ago. We were using Allen-Bradley
MicroLogix and Automation Direct touchscreens. To integrate this
same control package with those would have cost 10 times as much,
just in purchased parts, which we’d have to pass along to the
customer. We have several people doing programming. The Maple
Systems controller was very easy to program and integrate. They have
a really innovative perspective on the market.”
Report: The latest in HMI and Operator Interface technology
The Equinox will herald the dawn of smarter, smaller equipment at
Baron-Blakeslee. It plugs into a 120-V, single-phase outlet, just
like a computer does, and it offers quite a bit of computing
options.
“The Maple Systems controller has simplified troubleshooting,”
explains Oliver. “There’s an alarm history. We had none of this with
our old system. We can trend temperatures, too. It also gave us
password protection of certain settings. An operator of the old
machine could just open the cabinet and change settings. Now it
requires passwords. The Maple Systems controller we use has got
Ethernet connectivity too.”
The future is bright
Standardization on the Maple Systems controller also has allowed
Baron-Blakeslee to develop new equipment and bring it to customers
more quickly. “We’re making a distillation system we call the Nano,”
says Oliver. It runs 2 gal./hr. and puts the distilled, clean
Solstice PF back in the machine. We’re looking to put the Maple
Systems controller on that. We’re a UL shop. With the Maple Systems
controller, it’s an opportunity to bring new products to the market
faster, offer more features, streamline troubleshooting and maintain
packaging. It did more for us than we ever expected it would.”
Because Baron-Blakeslee is a very traditional and conservative
company, its departure from relay logic might be seen as risky.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” says Oliver. “But we’re moving
forward. For us, it was initiated as a matter of necessity. And we
keep looking at what other things we can do with it.”
⇐ Back To Case Studies
Please Sign in or Register to continue reading this
solution.