Bonfiglioli and I.DE s.r.l. the story of a successful partnership

I.DE s.r.l. is a manufacturer of transport line products. It was searching for a power transmission specialist who could provide a complete solution for the electronic control of a section of one of its plants, and found in Bonfiglioli the ideal collaborator to develop this project.

An Italian company founded in 2019, I.DE s.r.l. was founded on a union of expert professionals with over twenty years of experience in the industrial handling and automation sector. It produces a wide range of products, varying from standard conveyor units to personalised handling systems, and thanks to the efficient before- and after-sales support and maintenance service provided by its team of highly skilled professionals, it prides itself on always meeting its customers’ every need.

The Challenge

I.DE s.r.l. turned to Bonfiglioli because it needed a complete system to be supplied, from gearmotor reducers to electronics, enabling it to efficiently run an optimal pallet transport system for managing spare part movement, before and after a palletizer process, for an important player in the automotive sector based in Turin.

In particular, it required a solution for power transmission and electronic control of a section of one of its systems, consisting of:

No. of lines: 4
Type of lines: Roller conveyors
Line length: 16 m
END USER sector: OEM Mobile Machinery
No. of motor/gear unit/inverters supplied: 70

The Solution

Collaborating closely with the customer, as always, Bonfiglioli came up with a solution that involved the operation of various roller conveyor modules, combined to constitute the total line. Each group of motor/gear unit/inverters controls 10 rollers for the mechanical part and 2 photocells for the electrical part. These sensors check the presence and correct advancement of the pallets along the roller conveyor belt. One important feature of Bonfiglioli’s solution is its ability to connect directly with the IP65 inverter, thus taking advantage of the I/O board integrated with it.
The state of the photocells is passed to the PLC through PROFINET communication, where each inverter is an Ethernet node present on the network. Thanks to this Ethernet-based communication with cyclic and acyclic data, the operating data of the motor/gear unit/inverter can be monitored by checking any anomalies in real time. The same applies to the motor’s current-absorption, the torque required by the load, and other values necessary for the correct predictive monitoring of the power transmission unit.
From an electrical point of view, this has made it possible to obtain a reduction in the overall costs of the system, since the number of devices on the machine is limited, as well as a decrease in wiring hours. For the assembly of the DGM Modular inverter, a wall-mounted solution was chosen, in order to facilitate access to the electronic parts in the event of problems, and to guarantee reduced dimensions. At the same time, the operator can monitor the status of each roller unit from a distance, by checking the LED on the inverter.
Altogether, this system consists of 70 motor/gear unit/inverter groups, providing the opportunity in the future for the end-user to take advantage of the modularity described above to change the layout of the system or to increase its size. During the entire commissioning phase of the system, the Bonfiglioli Customer Application Engineering team worked in synergy with the technical office of I.DE s.r.l., thus ensuring the correct sizing and choice of the gearmotor group, as well as the correct setup of the DGM Modular electronic part. As well as this, the customer's software engineers were carefully trained in detail regarding both the Bonfiglioli V PLUS DEC software that manages the inverter, and its intrinsic functionality, in order to establish the best operative application equilibrium.

To meet the above requirements, the following components were chosen and used:

a CP37, as a gear unit
a MXN 10MA, as a three-phase asynchronous electric motor
a 0.55 kW DGM Modular for the inverter part, with Profinet communication to the PLC and the possibility of connecting digital inputs/outputs on the inverter itself.