Samenvatting

The present paper is to describe how the issue encountered by Voortman Steel Machinery, namely obtaining visible errors in symmetrical steel plate cutting due to bad bridge alignment, was handled by using a sensor system that can be built with minimum amount of resources and that can still take measurements with extreme accuracy (50μm). When put at work, the V304 plasma cutting machine’s bridge is moving along two parallel rails back and forth, and every now and then, due to different reasons such as a desync at the rail motors, the bridge gets dislodged, therefore, it travels on the axis perpendicular to the rail axis. Although the value of interest is the difference in position of the two lateral extremities of the bridge with respect to the rail axis, the proposed solution is to measure with the aid of inductive proximity sensors the displacement on the perpendicular axis, which will be referred to as the x-axis, and calculate the desired original displacement. The system can be regarded as a maintenance system due to its added value to the machine’s output and to the avoidance of a long term destructive impact on the machine that a malfunction such as the one that is mentioned could inflict. The lack of materials forced improvisation and reduced number of experiments but the accuracy of the system has been proven hence the concept can be regarded as a viable solution to Voortman’s issue.