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Automotive Industry

Behr-Gruppe

Intuitive SCADA-solution and alarm handling for soldering furnaces

The company

In 1905, Julius Friedrich Behr laid the foundation stone for a development that is still exemplary today with the founding of a workshop for the construction of car radiators. In fiscal 2005, Behr generated sales of around 3.0 billion euros with around 18,000 employees.

In the last 10 years alone, the Behr Group's sales have more than tripled. At the same time, the advantages of a medium-sized company culture, characterized by flexibility, avoidance of bureaucracy, and trust in individual employees, have been maintained to the benefit of Behr's customers. With around 18,000 employees at 10 development and 30 production locations worldwide, the Behr Group is an original equipment manufacturer and systems supplier to the international vehicle industry. At the growing location in the Czech Republic in Mnichovo Hradiste, radiators of various series are manufactured, among other things.

Task and solution

The task was to equip existing soldering ovens with a new control system.

Operation was to be simple and intuitive for the user. Among other things, this also included switching the user interface into different languages.

In order to keep the effort of later changes to the application small, the decision was made in favor of the Wizcon Supervisor product from emation. In September 2003, the company focus Industrieautomation was commissioned to create the application. Already in November 2003, the application was put into operation at the plant in the Czech Republic.

The Wizcon application communicates with the Siemens PLC of the 400 series via a standard network card using TCP/IP. This not only achieves a very good performance, but also provides the possibility to use the data points in the network for other purposes. The application is administered with appropriate authentication from the Czech plant as well as from the headquarters in Stuttgart. Historical data can be displayed individually by each operator or exported to a file.

The visualization gives the user a complete representation of the furnace. All important process parameters of the different aggregates are clearly displayed and can be changed from the visualization during operation. However, this is rarely necessary, since complete parameter sets, so-called recipes, are usually loaded automatically to the plant by mouse click for the parts to be produced. Any malfunction of the system is detected directly by the alarm system and can be eliminated promptly, which considerably reduces downtimes. An alarm is displayed with alarm text, start and end time. The plant part affected by the alarm is marked and provided with additional information such as the exact part designation. Based on this designation, the disturbed part can be found directly in the circuit diagram.

Configurable alarm filters allow the user to individually view alarms from the history and, if desired, export them to a file.

By April 2005, all furnaces at the Czech site had already been converted to Wizcon, with commissioning partly carried out from Merenberg, which significantly reduced engineering costs.

The project in compact

  • Wizcon Supervisor as control system
  • connection to S7-400 via TCP/IP
  • extensive alarm handling
  • intuitive and easy operation by maintenance staff
  • remote access