Virtual comissioning and software developement for an automatic machine prototype

The objective of this work is to realize a prototype of an automatic machine for the pharmaceutical industry. This model aims to produce a new generation of drugs. The process, that needs to be followed to produce a new type of drug, starts from the medicine in liquid form, then through a drastic lowering of the temperature, it passes to the solid state, and then is freeze-dried, in a sterile environment. The final result is a medicine in beads form. The machine is mainly composed of three robots and a dosing arm unit. Starting from a reservoir where the drug is in liquid form, the dosing arm unit sucks the liquid through ninety-six pipettes. In the initialization phase, the content of each pipette is emptied inside the weighted tubes by a dosing arm unit, then the first robot proceeds to the gross weighing of the test pieces. If all the doses are equal, then the dosing arm unit can proceed with the production of the beads, starting by sucking again the fluid from the reservoir. For nominal dosing, the dosing arm unit moves above a nitrogen-cooled plate, at a temperature of -110°C and let each pipette discharges a drop of liquid on to the freezing plate. Trays are handled by a pair of robotic arms. Since this is a completely new type of machine, the different phases are being studied and under development, so most of them have not yet being manufactured. For this reason, it has been created a simulation model that forms the basis of the Digital Twin, since it can already be used at a very early stage of the development process to test and compare various concepts. A 3D graphic model of the machine has been devised and thanks to the virtual commissioning, the physical behavior of the machine has been reproduced in a computer-generated way, through a software simulation applied to the Digital Twin. This safe virtual environment allowed to test the logic programmed into the PLC, for the single components and the synchronization of the whole machine movements.