EPN Industrial Automation Blog

Automation abroad

In many environments where automation would be very beneficial, e.g. for worker’s health, conditions are thoroughly adverse for machinery and sensitive embedded computers. Moreover, systems must be usable with protective gloves.

Safe speed

One of the key issues in automation is safety for personnel and material, not least because a production line not interrupted by accidents usually is more productive than the other kind.

Force, Food and Pharmaceuticals

High hygienic standards are crucial in food and pharmaceutical packaging to ensure product quality on the supply chain from the producer to the consumer. So, automation systems for those applications require special provision. A crucial component is the force transducer.

Under dry pressure

Installations in industrial automation often are subject to severe conditions like vibrations, corrosive gases or toxic fluids. That’s a difficult environment for electronics, even more for sensing elements. They need too be designed in special ways in order to withstand those kinds of threats.

More sensor output options

Factory automation applications are very diverse, in consequence, electronic components need to be very flexible. New output options make some ruggedized sensors more versatile.

The non-vibrating switch

Vibrating level switches are very common at measuring liquid levels, but they do have some disadvantages. The sensor heads tend to be compromised by flow, turbulence, bubbles, foam and suspended solids. A frequency sweep sensor poses an interesting alternative.

Faster safety

Protective doors, safety light barriers and emergency-off switches protect lives and health. These are excellent inventions for safety at the workplace, but they could be even better, if the work process would restart faster after the risky situation has been cleared.

ACOPOS drives are talking BISS

B&R extended its range of plug-in modules for the ACOPOS drive family to include a module for evaluating BiSS encoders.The BiSS fully digital bidirectional sensor interface is an open and license-free communication standard that allows sensor data to be read synchronously.

6-Axis Compact Control Unit

With the MACS4-DC6 the Swiss manufacturer of motion controllers zub machine control presents a compact 6-axis control unit which is meant to offer a low cost solution for simple positioning tasks.

Tiny, precise, optical: encoders with 50 or 100 lines per revolution

Electronic products keep shrinking, packages become more and more compact. Along goes the necessity for smaller components. The same is true in electromechanical systems that require miniature motors: Without advanced nanotechnology, physics poses some limitations to the miniaturization of motors; hence the aim is to make everything else as small as possible. One example are the encoders..