TIRA Spiral Welding
Silo Welding
Introduction: Tira NDA create world-leading stainless steel and specialty alloy solutions, they operate in a diverse range of industries that people need to live and work - including dairy and food, beverage, water, chemical, pharmaceutical, transport and energy. Tira NDA provides a personalised service to design, build, deliver, install and refurbish steel tanks with scale, collaborating with customers to achieve excellence.Stainless steel tanks have traditionally been tier-built onsite, a process that is complex and costly. Tira NDA has revolutionised this using spiral-welding technology, which enables them to quickly and efficiently build tanks both onsite and in a production environment.
Solution:Tait Controls assisted Tira NDA by rethinking and upgrading the process with the introduction of state of the art control. The first mobile system has been in operation for two years and has been building tanks on site around New Zealand and Australia.
Tira NDA has won a contract to supply fourteen silos to a dairy company based in the USA. The decision has been made to build the silos on site, therefore a new spiral welder had to be built to adhere to strict US electrical standards.
The knowledge and experience gained from two years of operation has identified areas of improvement within the mechanical design and the automation control systems.
The control system manages the spiral weld system, this incudes one decoiler leg, twelve jacking legs, two welders, two buffers and a chiller simultaneously.
The equipment we selected that was best suited for this process was a Rockwell PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) and a tablet style HMI (Human Machine Interface) used for running the machine, fault display and manual operation. The controller has a cellular modem to allow remote support.
Our proprietary custom solution needed to manage:
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Coil angle and height
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Automatic weld control
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Speed of decoiling
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High speed polishing (internal and external)
