Overview of an application
The most frequent applications where motion control plays a central role are of two types: the first is moving the product or workpiece to the workstation, and the second is the controlled movement of the tooltip that operates on the workpiece. To produce a product, several operations might be needed. Jumping forward to the application example of a VFFS, a plastic film needs to be pulled and shaped, then filled, sealed, cut, and so on. On the other hand, one operation that happens frequently is cutting a metal object to form a specific shape. We are talking about using a lathe, milling, grinding, and so on. The desired shape could be quite intricate, so the cutting edge of the tooltip might need to follow a complex path. It is sometimes even necessary that more than one tool needs to participate, either one after the other or in parallel. Let’s look at a real-life concrete example now. Let’s explore a VFFS machine application in the packaging...