Tulsa World turns to ABB for press controls and drives retrofits

Like many newspaper printers and publishers, Tulsa World, part of the Berkshire-Hathaway group, is ensuring its future business success by taking on an increasing number of third-party print orders. The first ABB project can be seen in the context of securing additional work for Tulsa World in this direction. The two Wifag OF370 presses at Tulsa World do not provide the level of redundancy that some third-party publishers would like to see. To rectify this, Tulsa World decided to install two additional Goss Metroliner folders on its presses and turned to ABB to provide the motors and drives to power the folders and also to integrate the folders into the existing ABB press control system.

The commissioning of the new motors and drives, together with the system integration, was completed in March of this year.

Following the successful completion of this first project, Tulsa World placed the second order with ABB for the step-by-step modular retrofitting of new drives, production management systems and parts of the control systems on one of their two existing Wifag press lines.

Sam Hightower, Vice President Operations BH Media Publishing Solutions picks up the story: "We have had a long relationship with ABB in some of our various BH Media Group markets. We relied heavily on them during the installation of the back-up folders that were installed on both WIFAG presses in Tulsa. ABB completed their portion of the work within the timelines requested in this project. We are currently running both of these folders each week."

"Additionally, we are starting a four-year plan to replace all obsolete electrical components on the WIFAG press in Tulsa. This project should start later this year and should be completed in 2020. During this time, we will need both presses most nights for our current production schedules. Performing this project with ABB’s involvement certainly helps me sleep better at night."

The project is divided into four phases.

In a first phase, to be completed this year, the press management system MPS Production will be upgraded to the latest version running in a cluster configuration, two obsolete versions of the MPS Control Console will be refurbished and put into production and two soft-proof clients will be added. In addition, the obsolete Wifag positioning systems on one printing tower will be replaced with the modern ABB APOS system and the drives will be replaced with modern ABB ACSM1 systems.

Phase two sees the replacement of the positioning and drives systems on one folder as well as a complete retrofit (controls & drives) of two reelstands.

The third phase sees similar retrofits on two printing towers and three reelstands, and the fourth and final phase, scheduled for completion in 2020, will cover two further towers and two reelstands.


Control room at the Tulsa World

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