When the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press realized its press runs were too large, it turned to a local company for help.

Blaine, Minn.-based Kim Automation had years of experience installing controls managing assembly lines and product distribution centers. Kim typically buys off-the-shelf components and assembles them into control systems relying on programmable logic controllers.

"The primary driver to installing a new counting and totalizing system was to reduce newsprint waste," said Michael Garayantes, the Pioneer Press´ assistant pressroom manager. "We were seeing a combination of shortages at the end of production runs in the downstream end of the packaging department, along with significant overages."

But the Pioneer Press (Monday-Friday, 189,994; Saturday 170,111; Sunday 251,956) offered Kim a unique challenge: measuring the somewhat irregular paths of newspapers flying off presses at a rate exceeding 35,000 per hour.

Sensing the count

The answer: photoelectric sensors, used to detect the motion of a newspaper past a fixed point. Kim added filters to clean up the sensors to permit them to send crisp signals to the processors for accurate counts.

Optical sensors installed by Kim Automation perform exact counts of newspapers coming off Goss Metroliners at the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Photos: Kim Automation

Press displays show various information such as good count, bad count and slow down setpoints at the Pioneer Press.
Photos: Kim Automation

Kim´s monitoring equipment augments the Goss Control System Two press management system originally installed on the Pioneer Press´ three Goss Metroliner presses.

The subsequent system boasts monochrome displays that monitor press performance, speeds, the actual "good count" for a particular line and the total paper count.

Run prediction times are also provided, using all known variables, updated in real time. When the run approaches a given set range, the console sends a warning to the operator to begin the shutdown process.

The three lines’ performance data are transmitted to a central supervisory area, where the information is compared.

That approach gives the Pioneer Press more flexibility, said Garayantes. If one press goes down, for example, operators immediately know what they need to do to increase the output of the other presses to take up the slack.

Pick counts and updates occur in real time, making the displays appear similar to a gasoline pump.

Helped downstream

Garayantes says the new monitoring system is so accurate that the Metroliners are now within .1 percent of optimum performance on a 300,000-copy press run.

There have been other benefits as well.

Because Kim’s system was calibrated, “it’s allowed us to find issues with downstream equipment like stackers, where before we were trying to rely on data that may or may not have been accurate,” Garayantes said.

That’s because the counters previously tracked the revolutions of the press and not the actual copies of the papers coming off, Garayantes said.