Cigarette production consists primarily of the prime line followed by cigarette making and packaging. The prime line holds the key to ensuring the quality of the cigarettes, but is also the most complex, employing the greatest variety of equipment.
The automatic control system of the prime line is based on leaf line, stem line, aroma feeding and other technology segments. In the whole cigarette production line, prime line technology offers the best opportunity for automation.
Before using Danfoss VLT® ProfiNet, the automation system mainly used Profibus and the Profibus connected drives played an important role in the prime line distributed control system, but the obvious disadvantage was that the bus topology was too inflexible, due to hardware limitations, making it difficult to expand into a star or tree structure. Profibus merely achieves the integration of the underlying I/O devices, but cannot be directly linked with the factory IT network, thus limiting management integration.