Heye Process Control: An incomparable success story

Heye ProcessMaster: Functional overview

GobMaster: Weight positions

As it reaches over 1000 process controls delivered to customers, Heye is the leading partner for process optimisation, regulation and digitalisation of the NNPB process. The Heye Process Control 4.0 (HPC)  was the crucial milestone to initiate Industry 4.0 within the glass industry.

Glass Machinery, Plants & Accessories 6/2021 - entire article

By delivering the 1000^th HPC, Heye comprehensively demonstrated that it has recognised and fulfilled the approach required by the market for stable and sustainable process data management in the past decades. The Heye Process Control is the essential closed-loop- system for every glass manufacturer in order to meet the high quality requirements of NNPB production.

Changes in customers’ process requirements have driven Heye International engineers to modify the Heye Process Control from solely a plunger sensor to a holistic solution. The data acquisition from different sensors and the regulation of process parameters are now realised in the Heye ProcessMaster in which the Heye Process Control becomes a subsystem.

The Heye ProcessMaster (HPM) is a modular central software solution which is used as a basis for most sensor solutions in Hot End production. HPM makes it now possible to implement single sensors as well as complex sensor systems.

These sensors are for example:

• the Heye GobMaster for weight control of BB-process and additional information like gob-shape, temperature and dimensions
• the Heye BlankMaster, which monitors different mould part temperatures and gob loading at the blank side
• stand-alone gob temperature sensor

All collected sensor and machine data can be used inside the production process to regulate process parameters like gob weight, press duration or mould part temperatures.

The collected data can also be extracted via Heye SmartLink to be used by a third-party Manufacturing Execution System (MES) to get a long-term history of all relevant machine and process data. This helps to generate a better understanding of the process and the machine behaviour and consequently to implement optimisations on process and machine.

In addition to all these hardware optimisations, Heye is always in contact with its customers to set up user interfaces for a friendlier and more intuitive operation. Hence, the HPM gets a reworked user interface on each operating system update to let the operator feel more comfortable and familiar when handling the system.