In this edition of Allied’s “Ask The Expert” series, the topic is industrial control panel design with Jim Davis, director of advanced solutions & technical support at Allied Electronics & Automation. Jim leads the technical support and application engineering teams Allied, collaborating with customer support and sales teams to ensure a best-in-class experience for the company’s customers.
For more than a decade, many Fortune 500 companies have been installing permanent electrical safety devices (PESDs) into electrical panels as a safety-by-design practice for both their mechanical and electrical lockout/tagout (LOTO) procedures. The voltage indicator (see Figure 1) lies at the center of these PESDs. It can illuminate when voltage (20-750VAC/30-100VDC) is present on any phase or neutral conductor, without the need for a battery or separate power supply.
Excessive inrush currents combined with harmonics triggered by Variable Frequency Drives (VFDs) in large motor applications put severe thermal burden on electrical components that are connected in the system. These conditions often lead to unpredictable early failures in key electrical components such as circuit breakers, bus bars and other terminations.
Allied Electronics & Automation continues to grow its list of more than 450 world-class supplier partners with the addition of bearings, linear motion and power transmission components from THK, Ringfeder, Timken, Contitech, Rexnord, INA and FAG. As part of its ongoing effort to deliver even greater selection and service to customers, Allied has expanded the capacity of its Fort Worth distribution center, added more than 10,000 new product lines and debuted nearly 50 new suppliers to date in 2020.
Rising infection rates and travel restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant that many of this year’s exhibitions and events were cancelled or postponed. After intense discussions with exhibitors and trade visitors, the automation industry’s international exhibition SPS – Smart Production Solutions – in Nuremberg was cancelled.
Allied Electronics & Automation is recently marking a significant milestone as the company recorded more than one million members on its DesignSpark engineering platform. This impressive number of registrations has been achieved in the same year that the company celebrates 10 years of DesignSpark and signals the platform’s importance and popularity amongst the global engineering community.
Recently, Panel Builder US had the opportunity to speak with Bitronics, a NovaTech company, that is focused on delivering power measurement, process control, and substation automation.
As of September 30, 2020, 968,458 data sets and 314 manufacturer are available in the EPLAN Data Portal.
Immersion cooling, first commercialized in the early 2000s, has generated a lot of attention and a host of eager advocates over the years. Compared to the more traditional liquid cooling solutions bringing cooling to IT appliances or directly onto the chips, immersion cooling essentially gives it a bath, submerging the equipment – lock, stock and barrel – into a pool of dielectric fluid.
Rockwell Automation, Inc. recently announced that it has acquired Oylo, a privately-held industrial cybersecurity services provider based in Barcelona, Spain. Oylo is dedicated to providing a broad range of industrial control system (ICS) cybersecurity services and solutions including assessments, turnkey implementations, managed services and incident response.
Agile innovation in the area of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will be the key in driving forward digital transformation in industrial applications into 2021 and beyond. That was the message delivered by Advantech IIoT President, Linda Tsai, to more than 2,000 delegates at the company’s first ever global IIoT Virtual Summit, entitled ‘Connecting Industrial IoT Innovation’, today (Tuesday 22nd September).
As the pandemic sent shockwaves through economies and supply chains across the world this year, manufacturers in critical sectors were forced to adjust quickly. To better weather unexpected crises, as well as industry shifts beyond COVID-19, manufacturers need to increase flexibility and resiliency in their supply chains. Increased automation and data availability in the plant can help.
PC-based control technology from Beckhoff, which has already been used successfully for almost three decades in all areas of industrial automation, has become an integral component of intelligent building automation. The demands on the intelligence of buildings have increased constantly in recent years, such that the energy efficiency as well as a good “return on investment” is the priority.
In the public water utilities sector, plant operators must ensure a reliable water supply to all consumers, while at the same time getting by with tight budgets. Their requirements include reliability through redundancy and safe communication of all components with the control system.
When it comes to optimizing and designing seamless processes in control cabinet manufacturing, the process steps and interfaces must be considered even before the actual engineering. Finding, obtaining, preparing, revising, and adapting item data for use in a CAE program eats up valuable resources and increases lead times for many companies that specialize in control cabinet manufacturing.
In spite of advancing digitalization, the following still applies: Manual workstations are indispensable, because automation is not always profitable with small batch quantities or complex processes. Such workstations are preferred at the Martinshof Werkstatt Bremen, a sheltered workshop for a mixed workforce including people with handicaps, as they are ideally suited for integrating persons with physical or cognitive handicaps into working life.