Marissa Delgado
Controls Engineer – Packaging Automation
Omaha, Nebraska
Controls engineer working on high-speed packaging systems, PLC migrations, and line reliability improvements for food manufacturing facilities. Most projects involve balancing production pressure, aging controls infrastructure, and limited shutdown windows. Frequently works alongside maintenance teams during troubleshooting and startup support.
Electrical
Electrical Power
Food and Beverage
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9 years
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Most of our downtime is not from code bugs, it is from recovery gaps. FATs usually prove the happy path. At SAT I now push messy scenarios: power blips, network drops, starved infeed, double hits on sensors, changeovers mid-cycle. The goal is simple: can the line get back to a safe known state fast, without a laptop.A few low-tech tests have paid off. A plug-in interval timer to flicker 24 V to remote I/O or VFDs. Tape over a photoeye to simulate stuck-on. Pull and reinsert Ethernet on a drive....
Seeing more stop and starve whiplash at end of line when WMS resequences orders or a live load gate time moves. One hour we are starving the palletizer, the next we are blocked to the rafters. The line chases pace and we pay with jams and micro stops. Classic case: erector speeds up, labeler pauses for a reprint, accumulation fills, palletizer faults on a pattern change.What helped is boring line control. We set a minimum run time after changeover, speed trim bands tied to downstream queue depth...
We pushed a small logic tweak on a case packer last week. I/O check passed, jog looked clean, and at 60 ppm it behaved. At 300 ppm the product eye chattered, the reject gate pulsed late, and we turned a minor change into a 40 minute jam clear and QA rework. The code was fine; our validation wasn't.Now I treat every change with three tiers: static I/O prove-out, slow walk with real product, then a rate ramp to 110% for 10 minutes. I inject upsets: block the photoeye, simulate an encoder drop...
Most of the bugs I fight do not show during IO checkout or a careful first start. They show up at speed and during recovery. Debounce, glue gun timing, starve and block logic, and recipe swaps on legacy PLCs with flaky comms are where downtime is born.Before I hand a line back, I run a 20-minute abuse test. Run at min speed, then max. Force a starve, then a block. Feed a scuffed carton to make the photoeye chatter. Drop and restore glue air. Yank and replug the legacy comms bridge. E-stop and gu...
In the last year, supply hiccups gave us a new carton footprint every other week. Procurement would swap corrugate or film last minute and our case packer, labeler, and palletizer recipes could not keep up. Most of our misses were simple: the right material on the floor with the wrong recipe on the HMI. That showed up as crushed cases, bad pallet patterns, and mislabeled pallets that held loads at the dock.What helped was making setups order-driven instead of operator-driven. We let the WMS push...
On our high speed packaging lines, every new SKU seems to come with a new case size and a pallet pattern tuned for perfect trailer cube. That turns into more palletizer recipes, more layer-forming tweaks, and more stretch wrapper settings. The line pays for it in longer changeovers and nuisance jams when a pattern is “close enough” but not quite right.We tested a different approach on one line. We locked the palletizer to four standard patterns and two case height bands, then mapped new SKUs to...
Most of the downtime I see on high-speed packaging lines is not fancy PLC bugs. It is mismatched assumptions between machines: the case packer expects the starwheel to be home before the conveyor jogs, the OEM skid drops its permit on a minor fault, or CIP steals plant air mid-cycle. The fix is not a nicer HMI. It is a clear interface contract at the system level.What has worked for us is a one-page interface control document per handoff. List signal names, who owns start/stop, permissives, faul...
We retrofitted a delta pick-and-place on a pouch line to chase 120 ppm. In FAT it looked great. On the floor, tiny shifts in pouch spacing and wrinkled seals turned into mis-picks and cascade faults. The robot caught the blame, but the real culprit was upstream variation and sloppy timing signals from a legacy encoder and photoeye.What actually solved it: a short metering belt with encoder-based spacing, a simple mechanical singulator to kill doubles, and tighter seal jaw timing. We moved the ca...
I keep getting asked to drop a cobot next to a carton sealer to save a headcount. In a food plant with nightly washdown, mixed SKUs, and short changeovers, that has bitten us more than it has helped. Cobots are slow, they struggle in spray and foam, and tooling drifts faster than anyone admits.For 60+ ppm pick and place or case packing, a standard robot with real guarding, IP-rated components, and solid fixturing has been the reliable choice. Keep the interface simple: start, stop, estop, clear...
Spent last week chasing random stops on a new case packing cell. Everyone blamed the robot or the PLC.Root cause was inconsistent corrugate and warped RSCs. The EOAT lost vacuum and retries stacked up; vision missed edges; maintenance chased sensors. We slowed the cycle a touch, changed the cup layout, added simple squaring guides and a cheap air knife. Also set a hard fault after two retries instead of six to stop making a mess. Downtime dropped.Takeaway: before reaching for smarter vision or p...