Real-Time Data Acquisition and Control System Helps Boat Builder Keep Hull Weight and Thickness on Track

The heart of the new material monitoring system: The modular measuring amplifier system PMX

Today, Sea Ray’s new MMS, now in the last stages of a year-long beta test on the yacht production line, dispenses with the wheel and stroke counter. Instead, Minogue has linked a PMX signal conditioning system (Figure 1) to load cells from a high accuracy scale to a pallet holding the fiberglass spools and to a flow transmitter connected to a flow meter that controls the amount of resin that goes to each of two chopper guns. A lamination monitor (Figure 2), a custom-built Power over Ethernet system with connected Honeywell barcode scanners, provides constant progress updates to chop spray operators. Each operator simply scans the barcode associated with each section of the hull, which appears on the screen of the lamination monitor. As the operator pulls the trigger on the chopper gun, the lamination monitor displays the material usage and compares it to the specified amount in real-time. The lamination monitoring system, custom developed by DragonPoint Software, Inc., provides status updates on job progress to managers, updates inventory, etc., as well as reporting results to the facility’s engineering and quality database (Figure 3).

A variety of factors weighed into Minogue’s decision to choose a modular signal conditioning solution as the basis for his Material Monitoring System. He originally considered using individual signal conditioners to read the signals from the analog equipment, mostly because they’re both readily available and inexpensive. However, he was particularly motivated to choose a system that could offer the flexibility to add more signal channels easily for additional equipment for measuring gel coat usage, temperature, humidity or other factors. When measuring only weight and flow signals, a single 16-channel PMX system has the capacity to run eight chopper guns. Minogue notes, “We’ve used HBM’s SoMat ruggedized mobile data acquisition equipment in our testing lab for years, so I was pretty familiar with what they could and couldn’t do. I looked at the PMX because I needed a device that was pretty advanced and had a built-in Application Programming Interface (API) that would let me build a database to read signals from all this equipment.” Minogue’s MMS has proven itself invaluable over the course of a year of beta testing on the Sea Ray yacht line at the Merritt Island facility, helping operators reduce material costs, work more efficiently by enhancing process control and keeping the finished parts compliant with the weight specs. For the Sea Ray 590 hull, the use of this technology has resulted in a 1,000-pound savings in chopped glass and resin. Currently, the MMS is slated to roll out on production lines for Bayliner, Boston Whaler and other Sea Ray models in other Brunswick production facilities over the next two years.