Our team in India

An Indian technology company - specializing in the design, development and manufacture of tailor-made automation solutions for the pharmaceutical industry - was faced with the challenge of developing a real-time visual inspection system for the quality assurance of pharmaceutical packaging as part of a customer project. This system checks both the correct shape and the integrity of aluminum sealing caps of medical injection vials that contain a rubber membrane for extracting liquid ingredients by syringe.

The solution consists of a conventional desktop PC with an i7 processor and 32 GB RAM, which is connected to two cameras via LAN cable and classic Ethernet. These provide the images for the visual inspection of the pharmaceutical containers on the conveyor system and inspect the lids for damage or cosmetic deviations such as bends, cracks, stains or wrinkles. The comprehensive image data is then processed using FabImage Studio 5.3 Professional software. The final task was to establish an efficient and reliable real-time data transfer from this Ethernet-based PC system to the Siemens S7 PLC via PROFINET IO so that the PLC could initiate the ejection of faulty injection vials. This presented various challenges.

The challenge: Access to historian data

The core business of one of Hilscher‘s customers encompasses products and engineering services for a wide range of industrial, commercial and customer markets, one of which is the pharmaceutical and chemical industry. With its in-house developed Distributed Control System (DCS), the system integrator offers one of the most important parts of a pharmaceutical or chemical production plant. Such DCS systems consist out of two major components:

-> Software to visualize, monitor and operate chemical processes

-> The controller, which directly influences the Process Skids and provides access to the internal data of the process

One major feature of the DCS is the accessibility of historian data of the processes, which enables operators of chemical plants to automatically generate signed batch reports, which are crucial for quality assurance in order to meet the high demands set in the pharmaceutical sector. Since this feature requires access to the process data such as temperature or pressure during specific stages of the manufacturing process, the extend and complexity of the DCS’ integration highly depends on the customer needs.

Translation between DCS and process skids

In a specific use case, a biopharmaceutical company from India wanted such a DCS to control various independent process skids from different manufacturers. However, the process skids were using PROFINET IO as communication protocol, while the DCS of Hilscher‘s customer was relying on Ethernet/IP, setting the task of combining these two types of devices.

Easy integration with cifX

In order to close the challenging gap between image data processing and the field level, the communication experts from Hilscher India were finally called in. With the cifX PC cards, which are available in all common form factors, Hilscher offers the ideal portfolio for integrating PC-based devices and systems quickly and easily into automated environments.

Ultimately, the customer opted for the PCI Express card CIFX 50E-RE, which is based on Hilscher's netX100 SoC and can function as either a master or slave. The multi-protocol capability of the PC card enables industrial communication across all common Real-Time Ethernet (RTE) as well as fieldbus systems. The protocol can be changed by simply reloading the firmware. A particular advantage for the integration of the Hilscher PC card with the FabImage inspection software was that the FabImage Library already contained fully developed functions and APIs for cifX and PROFINET. This reduced the integration effort to a minimum.