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FACHAUX - Fruit grading machine

The customer

For 50 years, Fachaux has been designing and manufacturing machines for use in fruit packaging.
Fachaux specialises in machines for grading fruit and vegetables, from cherries to aubergines, from nuts to melons.

Its requirement

The purpose of the machine is to automatically sort fruit by weight bands. Each fruit is placed on a dish which files past at high speed on a rail. Without interruption, the system must precisely measure the weight of the fruit or vegetable and eject it into the required section.

  • Grading rate of 5 to 12 per second, according to the type of fruit
  • Weighing precision: +/- 1 g to +/- 5 g according to the type of fruit

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Our solution

SCAIME offered a solution in collaboration with Schneider Electric:

  • An M238 PLC manages the overall control system.
  • The weighing system is composed of an AQ single point load cell with a capacity of 15 kg, combined with an Enod3-C weighing controller equipped with application software for on-the-fly weighing.
  • The eNod3-C oversees detection of the presence of fruit on the weighing section, measurement acquisition at very high speed (up to 800 measurements/sec), digital filtering and calculation of the weight of the fruit.
  • At the end of the weighing process, the eNod3-C controller sends the fruit weight value to the PLC, which ejects it into the appropriate section.

 

  • AQ 15 kg single point load cell

  • eNod3-C

  • Schneider Electric M238 PLC

SCAIME PRODUCTSAUTOMATION PRODUCTS
architecture-fachaux-web

Customer benefit

This architecture optimises the system’s performance/cost ratio, since each device  performs the tasks at which it is most effective:

  • The eNod3-C processes the signal and controls the on-the-fly weighing operation.
  • The PLC controls conveyance and ejection of the fruits.
  • Communication is facilitated by use of the CANopen interface between eNod3-C and the PLC.

In this way, the system reaches the desired maximum rate of 12 fruits per second with a precision level of +/- 1 g.

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Downloads

Applications leaflet
Grading, Check-weighing
FA-CHECKWEIGHING-E-0221.pdf
Langues : EN
Plant engineering, machine control
FA-PROCESS_WEIGHING-E-1123.pdf
Langues : EN
Application cases
FACHAUX - Fruit grading machine
NA-03P-FACHAUX-E-0715.pdf
Langues : EN