Changing gears quickly: high-performance transmission production

With over 13,000 employees, the VW plant in Baunatal — 10 km south of Kassel — is Volkswagen’s second largest production site in Germany and one of the concern’s most important component suppliers. This primary transmission plant in Kassel supplies the entire Volkswagen organisation worldwide with around 2.8 million manual and automatic transmission systems annually.

Here, in Europe’s largest light metal foundry, the required casings (made of aluminium and magnesium) are also produced. The original parts distribution division is also located at the plant, from which more than 17 million original parts are despatched around the world.

ThyssenKrupp Krause GmbH develops, builds, produces and delivers turnkey power-train assembly systems including the relevant inspection and test plants for the automobile and component supplier industry. The Kassel production site is ThyssenKrupp Krause’s first complete assembly line of 35 control units for future dual-clutch transmission systems. It covers an area the size of a football pitch and uses high-performance PLC systems with Speed7 technology from VIPA. With a production capacity of several hundred transmission systems for petrol and diesel motors per day, this plant is one of the most modern, high-capacity plants of its kind.

One completed gearbox leaves the conveyor belt every two minutes during the course of this complex assembly process. The plant’s high-grade complexity with 14 robot stations, four transport system segments, rail turning stations with rotary position control, as well as component positioning with absolute encoders, needed a high-performance control system.

A fast, resilient communication medium was indispensable for ensuring the highest quality standards providing automatic control of all process stages as well as the centralised capture and processing of all operating and quality data.

VIPA GmbH has been providing the machine and plant engineering industry with complete PLC systems for more than 20 years and is able to react to challenges competently and quickly with flexible and innovative solutions.

The option of cross-system programming with Step7 from Siemens makes VIPA a customer-friendly PLC provider for all performance categories.

The in-house Speed7 technology meant that ThyssenKrupp Krause had high performance available and flexible capacity management could be optimally adapted to Volkswagen’s requirements. The capacity can also be adapted dynamically to later plant/application requirements without having to change existing hardware.

High-performance communication interfaces on board with specially integrated ethernet interfaces, together with the standard, highly integrated main memory with fast Speed7 technology, were the deciding factors in ThyssenKrupp Krause choosing VIPA Speed7 CPUs for the Volkswagen’s Kassel production site.
The assembly line uses 37 identically constructed Speed7 CPUs communicating with one another, the plant being networked via the integrated CPU interface in a central distribution box.

With cycle times of just 0.015 or 0.090 μs (fixed/floating point arithmetic) and a base memory of 1 MB for programs and data, the VIPA Speed7 CPU 315SN/NET with integrated ethernet-CP343 Lean proved the ideal PLC system for these special requirements.

“The VIPA Speed7 CPUs’ tremendous performance capacity, the substantial memory capacity and the integrated ethernet communication processors are what have persuaded us to also equip future plants with VIPA systems,” confirmed Bernfried Trittin from ThyssenKrupp Krause, responsible for the management and implementation of the Volkswagen project.

VIPA Automation
www.vipaautomation.com
Automation Warehouse
www.automationwarehouse.com.au