Proposed industrial concept for automating a food production process using PLC

The world has seen in the past decade the entry of automation in most industrialized areas such as automation, chemical, cement, textile and electronics industries. The food industry is one of these industries which plays an important role in the economy of any country. As Iraq is one of the developing countries and tries to catch up with the developed countries, Iraq needs to increase its interest in this type of industry. One of the important parts of the developing policy for any branch of the industry is automation. This paper focuses on automating a food production process by designing an automated system based on the technologies of the programmable logic controller (PLC) to solve two problems; the first problem is to control precisely the amount of dough that is filled in a product molds on a conveyor belt which spins in a specific speed. The second problem is to monitor any deviation in the speed of the conveyor belt that moves the product and gives a warning signal to the operator in the event of any deviation. The design of the simulation model mainly adopted the technology of the controller type (PLC LOGO! V7.0) as it contains high specifications as compared with conventional control methods and it has rapid responses to signals coming from the sensors tethered on the parts of the production line such as ultrasonic distance sensor and inductive sensors.