Research of Continuous Thermoplastic Coating Equipment Based on Virtual Simulation

In order to realize the industrialization of the new thermoplastic coating method for osmotic pump tablets, it is necessary to develop new continuous coating equipment for thermoplastic coating. In order to accelerate the process of equipment development and reduce the research and development cost, this paper proposed a novel simulation method with VUP and PLC to test and validate the newly designed equipment in a virtual environment. After building a 3D model of the equipment in VUP and designing the PLC control algorithm in PLC, a communication connection is established between PLC and VUP, enabling the PLC at TIA Portal V16 to send control commands to control the mechanical system at VUP and receive feedback from the mechanical system at VUP. The novel simulation method can test and validate the system design, including the program and mechanical structure, in a virtual environment, and the potential problems can be identified in advance to avoid the high costs associated with fixing these problems at the physical prototyping stage. The simulation experiment and its actual experiment results show that the designed hardware and software can realize the continuous thermoplastic coating process.