Is LabVIEW in use in the Food Industry ?

[chilly_charly]

In the past few months,  I have had a poor time with my collegues : very few of them, even in the Computer Sciences field, really believe LabVIEW could have any interest for the students in our engineering school. This is NOT a joke !
The general idea is that LabVIEW is probably a nice tool to build rapid prototype solutions at lab scale, but is scarcelly used for industrial process control (understand "serious work").

This is something that makes me feel sick (something I would prefer to avoid... private joke ;-)), since we should be preparing the next generation french executives !

Presently we are training about 200 Engineers (in France that's a top level diploma, better than Master of Sciences) in Food sciences, Water ressources, Electronics, Composite Materials. None of them has ever been taught about LabVIEW (except for a few hours I teach my own students).

Of course, as a biologist, my opinion as the value of a handfull of peanuts, wathever I have successfully created using LabVIEW...

The only way to change this situation would be to prove that a number of industrial companies have already identified LabVIEW as one of the best programming tool.

Surprizingly, this does not seems to be the case in France, otherwise there would be an explicit demand from these companies.

I have a special interest in the food industry. I found a few application examples on the NI site (14). However only 5 appears to be relevant :
Field Point and Canning line control - http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-132 
Control System for Testing Beverage Vending Machines using PXI - http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-397 
Robotic Control with LabVIEW, NI-DAQ, and Vision - http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-481 
PAC Platform for Industrial Automation - http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-500 
Tratamientos con Fines Cuarentenarios para Mango - http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-10143  

The other are either research applications,  sometime presented by university labs, or are out of date.
One presents BridgeVIEW, another CVI and three discuss LookOut).

Rather sad isn't it ? And clearly not enough to support the idea that LabVIEW is a fantastic tool that should be taught to every scientist and engineer.

Accordingly I'm in search for testimonials of applications in teh Food Indsutry (even industrial research would be fine !) and I would be gratefull to hear from all of you here !

Message Edité par chilly charly le 10-23-2007 03:43 PM

[tst]

I'm not sure how you would define "the food industry", but we've done all kinds of industrial control systems using pure LabVIEW, and it's definitely possible, although it has its limitations. The biggest limitation is probably that NI hardware and specifically I/O is relatively expensive - when a FieldPoint chassis only holds 8 I/O modules and is more expensive than a PLC which can hold more, you will run into problems with high-I/O-count systems. We've done systems with non-NI hardware where a LabVIEW program on the PC does all the control logic, but that also has its disadvantages.

If you want specific examples, we've done systems which wash and sort carrots (the biggest is a large factory where a single operator can process over 20 tons\hour), corn, beans, fish and probably some others. In any case, a control system is a control system - it should not really matter whether it fills cans or mixes vats of paint.

[chilly_charly]

I'm not the one to convince ! 😄

I need specific application examples, with possibly the name and size of the company. I would like to write a report and present it to the staff of my Engineering school, and convince them to create a significant space for LabVIEW, discarting some other tools...

Can you give me more details ?

Thanks, tst

Message Edité par chilly charly le 10-23-2007 04:20 PM

[tst]

Send me an email with more details about what exactly you need. I'll try to come up with something by tomorrow night.

[tst]

I would also suggest that you talk to NI France. They might know of some specific companies in the relevant industries which use NI hardware.

[chilly_charly]

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tst a écrit:
I would also suggest that you talk to NI France. They might know of some specific companies in the relevant industries which use NI hardware.

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I have done that already. Not much success. Probably because they can't speak for their customers for confidentiallity reasons. Soimething that I can understand...

[tbob]

Bonjour CC.   C'est bon pour vous avoir encor.

Before coming to Freescale about 3 months ago, I interviewed with a company called Computerway Food Systems in High Point, North Carolina.  They are a small company.  They produce a robotic line that handles chickens, cuts them into parts, and prepares them for shipment to the grocery stores.  The entire process is run by Labview.  They use LV to control the servo motors and sensors on the processing line.  Also use LV for data collection and data processing.  It was quite impressive.  I turned down the position because my family didn't want to move.  Here is their website:  http://www.computerwayfoodsystems.com/  Nathan Biggs is the Labview guru there.

I hope this helps a little.

[tst]

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@chilly charly wrote:

I have done that already. Not much success. Probably because they can't speak for their customers for confidentiallity reasons.

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Ask them if there is anyone relevant. If there is, try seeing if they are willing to contact them and give them your details so that they can choose whether to contact you or not. It seems to me that this would be in NI's interest as well.

[PaulG.]

To quote tst: "In any case, a control system is a control system - it should not really matter whether it fills cans or mixes vats of paint." is exactly on the mark.

I was convinced that LabVIEW could do "serious work" just a few years ago after I completed a debug/prototype development on a non-working but fully-featured ultrasonic C-Scan application. The Test Manager I was working for decided LabVIEW was only good for "reading thermocouples" and wanted it rewritten in C to get "real time" and "better performance".

I wasn't having any part of that. After some tweaking here and debug there I got this 1Gs/sec DAQ system working - deterministically - without RT. I had to convince a Russian physicist, and I did. You should be able to convince a few of your peers.

Good luck Charly. You have my sympathy. It's hard to change the culture and prejudices of an industry, but your efforts will be rewarded - eventually. LabVIEW is a powerful tool, and is perfectly capable of doing "serious work". But you might have to prove it yourself.

[Ben]

We have done a couple that were vistion based.

One checked for labels on jars and rejected if wrong.

Another made sure the cap was on bottles.

I'll check with the engineer that developed those apps to see if he ever wrote them up.

Ben