Seamless, secure multi-lingual control and monitoring across auxiliaries

With the introduction of the DC-B ‘Common Control’ across dryers and drying equipment with throughputs above 15 lb/hr, Conair’s multi-year effort to implement a common control across all of its HMI interfaced upstream auxiliary equipment is complete. Now, customers can equip any of the following drying products with a control platform whose interface shares the same interactions and features as other Conair auxiliary equipment:

“The introduction of the DC-B Common Control across the Conair drying product line represents a tremendous, multi-year engineering effort to create an identical user experience across virtually all of Conair’s upstream auxiliary equipment. It means that our dryer customers now receive a control with that offers the same interaction style, features, colors, languages, communication, and monitoring capabilities whether you’re processing 15 lbs/hr or 5,000 lbs/hr”, says A.J. Zambanini, Conair Drying Products Manager.

And, he adds, “The same control interface is already available in our blending, conveying, and temperature control auxiliaries, so there’s much less training involved for an operator to understand and master the use of different auxiliary equipment. Our customers have told us that training and retaining personnel are among the biggest challenges they face. These new Conair controls aim to make both of those tasks easier.”

Since Conair announced plans to adopt the common control platform in the dryers, the company has added three new features, which include:

  • An automatic Airflow Monitor, which electronically measures the total airflow quantity (cfm) in all drying equipment, complementing the automatic dewpoint monitoring to ensure that the quality and quantity of drying airflow is correct.
  • Setback on input—Normally, temperature setback is automatically triggered over a period of hours by the elevated temperature readings that occur when a process slows or shuts down. The new Setback on Input feature allows the system to reduce to a standby temperature based on machine downtime. This gives the user an additional level of control and provides energy-saving and material overdry protection automatically, such as when production must pause for a mold change.
  • Self-adapting “smart” recipes – the DC-B control offers 20 standard recipes and can store up to 3,000 production recipes overall. These recipes not only take into account the basic dry parameters of temperature and dew point but also include the loading criteria and alarm setpoints. As more features such as VFD, level control, and Drying Monitor are added, these inputs are also captured in the recipe. This means the recipes is truly “smart,” enabling the entire dryer setup to change with the push of a button. This is a far cry from the laminated recipe sheets of the past.
DC-B Common Control
The new DC-B “Common Control” is now available on all Conair dryers with capacities from 15 to 5,000 lb/hr. Built to minimize operator training costs, this control provides an identical user experience across HMI interfaced upstream auxiliary equipment.

The common control for dryers is available in two different versions. Dryers from 15 to 400 lb/hr, which would include the D Series dryers and the dX Series mobile dryers can use a Plus or a Premium version of the control. The Plus version is a 4-inch color touch-screen control. It is geared to operators who like to keep things simple by using push buttons, LCD controllers and toggle switches. Start/stop, dew-point setting and temperature setting can all be accomplished from the main screen with almost no other capabilities visible. However, real-text alarms and alerts can be accessed on a secondary screen and still another page shows all of the current data and status in chart form.

The 7-inch premium DC-B control (optional on smaller dryers, and standard on larger D Series dryers with throughput from 600 to 5000 lbs/hr) adds more feature content to the system and provides a larger touch-screen area, along with additional navigation features. Dryer set-up and status information appears graphically on a diagram. The Premium 7-inch control can also be supplied with an energy-saving “Optimizer” package – developed for PET processing – that adds a variable frequency blower drive, Drying Monitor™ probe, return-air dew-point monitor, volatile trap, and process-filter monitor to D Series dryers. Optimizer is an algorithm-based drying control that automatically reduces energy usage based on the drying needs of the resin.

Conair Group (www.conairgroup.com) offers innovative auxiliary equipment solutions to plastics processors around the world. With 32 degreed engineers, including 16 senior team members with an average of over 23 years of experience, Conair brings unparalleled technical expertise and support to its customers, guaranteeing its products will deliver maximum productive uptime. Twenty parts and service team members respond to tens of thousands of calls each year, answering in an average of about 15 seconds. Over 450 individual products include resin drying systems, blenders, feeders and material-conveying systems, temperature-control equipment and granulators. Extrusion solutions include line-control systems, film and sheet scrap-reclaim systems and downstream equipment for pipe and profile extrusion. Conair also has specialized expertise in every major end market – such as packaging, medical, transportation, building and construction, and many others – and strives to ensure plastics processors succeed in today’s competitive global marketplace.