CASE STUDY: PRECISE TEMPERATURE CONTROL
Industry: Semiconductor
Customer Profile:
IndustLabs worked with a semiconductor manufacturer that specializes in thermo-electric modules and systems, based in Dallas, Texas. The companies product focus is in thermoelectric heating, cooling, power generation and energy harvesting serving the Aerospace & Defense, Medical, Commercial & Industrial, Automotive and Telecommunications market segments.
Challenge:
The manufacturing of the thermoelectric modules at the Dallas, TX facility was out of date and needed to be modernized with existing automated and thermal technology. The customer’s fleet of industrial ovens required precise temperature controls and precise motion controls for the production of the thermoelectric modules. The customer needed to upgrade the industrial controls of the thermoelectric modules to control four stages of temperature control, (Melting, Alloying Stage 1, Alloying Stage 2, & Growing) with a temperature range of 0 to 1500 Celsius and within +/- 0.01 of a degree of temperature variability from set point and a motion system to regulate +/- 0.001 of an inch of displacement variability from set point.
How the Product Help:
IndustLabs developed engineering and installed a thermal system for the production of the thermoelectric module semiconductor material to control temperature and the motion via a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), Servo Motion System, a process controller for precise temperature control, a Human-Machine Interface (HMI), and a Battery BackUp System (BBS). IndustLabs drafted custom software for the production of the thermoelectric systems that was able to remotely monitor all eight industrial ovens and extracted all 1000 system variables to a Microsoft SQL database for further analysis by the Marlow Industries research team.
Results:
The temperature control system IndustLabs developed can control temperature set point within +/- 0.01 of a degree of temperature variability from set point.
Our motion control system can control motion displacement set point within +/- 0.001 of an inch of motion displacement from set point.
The IndustLabs team developed a custom Human-Machine Interface program that allowed the operator to create 100 unique profiles or “recipes” of the proprietary Marlow thermoelectric products.
Our custom software allowed for remote monitoring and control of the thermoelectric system
We also developed software that automatically collects 1000 different system variables every 1 second and batches them to a Microsoft SQL database.
