Hcc/kpm

HCC/KPM, a consolidation of Herkules Controls Corporation, of Memphis, TN and the controls team of Kube Plekker Microsystems, of Ford City, PA, has nearly half its staff of 28 housed in a modern glass building on the site of the former PPG glass works, overlooking the Allegheny river, 30 miles NE of Pittsburgh, PA. Most of the other employees work... on the premises of the parent company, Maschinenfabrik Herkules Siegen in Germany. KPM/Herkules USA, the manufacturing arm of Herkules Group in the US, has several large manufacturing and assembly halls on the PPG site. It revamps most any known brand of roll grinding machine and manufactures new machines designed by the Herkules Group. We aim to supply the perfect control system to the machine tool manufacturers of Herkules Group. We have reconciled the different traditions we inherited into a single control system that can be tailored to custom applications. The Beckhoff Lightbus hardware we introduced in 1998 has now made way for EtherCat. The software continues to use Beckhoff's TwinCat for PC based PLC-style control with IEC1131 standard languages and a proprietary Graphical User Interface. When Herkules Group delivers complete roll shops, HCC/KPM contributes controls and auxiliary systems, calipers, defect testing, surface inspection and roll shop management systems. Together with a major customer we developed an Ultrasonic Wheel Analysis Tool, which can map the natural variations in a grinding wheel's composition. Left unchecked, these variations may result in uneven surface quality of the rolled sheet. Knowing these variations beforehand helps the operator assure constant quality grinding.Read More