This new al­li­ance with Ar­row Elec­tron­ics com­ple­ments TDK-Lambda’s ex­ist­ing dis­tri­bu­tion agree­ments in the EMEA re­gion, provid­ing an in­teg­rated and seam­less ser­vice to a wider range of cus­tom­ers through Ar­row Elec­tron­ics’ dual cap­ab­il­ity in lo­gist­ics ex­pert­ise and design-in com­pet­ence. The col­lab­or­a­tion is ex­pec­ted to open new busi­ness op­por­tun­it­ies, foster in­nov­a­tion and drive growth by reach­ing pre­vi­ously un­tapped mar­kets.

Meet­ing the re­quire­ments of di­verse cus­tom­ers 

Ar­row Elec­tron­ics will provide wide-ran­ging design-in sup­port through its solu­tion field ap­plic­a­tion en­gin­eer (FAE) teams across EMEA, as well as ded­ic­ated deep power-re­lated ques­tions with its power mar­ket de­vel­op­ment en­gin­eer (MDE) team. The agree­ment is de­signed to cov­er a broad range of ap­plic­a­tions rather than tar­get a spe­cif­ic area. This al­lows TDK-Lambda to lever­age its di­verse product of­fer­ings across vari­ous in­dus­tries, in­clud­ing med­ic­al, in­dus­tri­al, auto­mot­ive, new en­ergy, and more, max­im­ising mar­ket op­por­tun­it­ies and ca­ter­ing to a wide ar­ray of cus­tom­er needs. 

“We are thrilled to join forces with Ar­row Elec­tron­ics as our first pan-European dis­trib­ut­or,” says Flori­an Sei­friz, Dis­tri­bu­tion Dir­ect­or EMEA, TDK-Lambda Europe. “This agree­ment paves the way for sig­ni­fic­ant mar­ket pen­et­ra­tion and en­hanced cus­tom­er en­gage­ment across the re­gion, en­sur­ing our di­verse solu­tions are read­ily ac­cess­ible and ex­pertly sup­por­ted."

“We look for­ward to work­ing closely with TDK-Lambda's tech­nic­al and FAE teams to of­fer com­pre­hens­ive solu­tions and achieve our joint growth tar­gets across the EMEA mar­ket," adds Jörg Strug­hold, Pres­id­ent Glob­al Com­pon­ents EMEA, Ar­row Elec­tron­ics.
 

LAPP is con­tinu­ing to grow its man­u­fac­tur­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies and mar­ket pres­ence in the field of in­dus­tri­al con­nect­ors. Foun­ded in 2015, Cable­force Elec­tron­ics Co., Lim­ited spe­cial­izes in the field of cir­cu­lar con­nect­ors and has been a part­ner of LAPP since its early days. Now, the com­pany based in Dong­guan-City near Shen­zhen is a 100 per­cent sub­si­di­ary of LAPP Group.

Lever­aging glob­al cap­ab­il­it­ies 

Mat­thi­as Lapp, CEO of the LAPP Group states: “In the past ten years, Cable­force has built up an im­press­ive mar­ket po­s­i­tion, port­fo­lio, and en­gin­eer­ing com­pet­ence in cir­cu­lar con­nect­ors. These unique cap­ab­il­it­ies make them a great ad­di­tion to our in­dus­tri­al con­nect­ors of­fer­ing - be­ne­fit­ting our cus­tom­ers world­wide. Through this mer­ger, we will lever­age Cable­force on a glob­al scale - by mak­ing them a part of LAPP´s net­work and our team of more than 5.700 com­mit­ted em­ploy­ees around the world.”

With its LAPP China headquar­ters in Shang­hai since 2003 and two pro­duc­tion plants opened in 2012 and 2023, the Ger­man fam­ily-owned com­pany has been act­ive in China for more than two dec­ades. Mat­thi­as Lapp says: “China is one of our most im­port­ant growth mar­kets, and we are de­term­ined to fur­ther ex­pand our pres­ence: Fol­low­ing our loc­al for loc­al strategy, we are con­tinu­ously in­vest­ing in­to our R&D com­pet­en­cies, man­u­fac­tur­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies and tech­nic­al sales net­work in China and the Asia-Pa­cific re­gion.”

Cable­force cur­rently em­ploys over 100 people. Both com­pan­ies have agreed not to dis­close the fin­an­cial de­tails of the trans­ac­tion. 
 

Delta Lo­gic brings ex­tens­ive ex­pert­ise in com­mu­nic­a­tion between PC-based sys­tems and pro­gram­mable lo­gic con­trol­lers (PLCs) to Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al. A par­tic­u­lar fo­cus is on soft­ware solu­tions based on OPC UA – the glob­ally lead­ing tech­no­logy for cross-sys­tem data ex­change between products from dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers. One of Delta Lo­gic’s core areas is soft­ware and hard­ware products around the Siemens con­trol­ler range. 

These solu­tions per­fectly com­ple­ment Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al’s stra­tegic core busi­ness and open up new growth op­por­tun­it­ies in the field of in­dus­tri­al data com­mu­nic­a­tion.

In­teg­ra­tion by early 2026

As of April 11, 2025, the man­age­ment of Delta Lo­gic Auto­mat­is­ier­ung­s­tech­nik GmbH has been as­sumed by Thomas Hilz and Thomas Rum­mel, the joint Man­aging Dir­ect­ors of Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al. Full in­teg­ra­tion in­to the Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al or­gan­iz­a­tion is planned for the end of 2025. At that point, the Delta Lo­gic brand will also be fully mi­grated, with all products and solu­tions op­er­at­ing un­der the name Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al go­ing for­ward.

Thomas Hilz, Man­aging Dir­ect­or of Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al, stated: “We’ve known the Delta Lo­gic team for many years through joint de­vel­op­ment work. We are de­lighted to wel­come our new col­leagues and look for­ward to driv­ing fur­ther growth for Delta Lo­gic’s products through Soft­ing’s in­ter­na­tion­al sales net­work.” Thomas Rum­mel, also Man­aging Dir­ect­or of Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al, ad­ded: “The ex­pert­ise de­veloped by com­pany founder Rain­er Hönle in ac­cess­ing Siemens con­trol­lers is un­matched in the mar­ket. This know-how ideally com­ple­ments our port­fo­lio in the field of in­dus­tri­al com­mu­nic­a­tion.”

Petra Hönle, former Man­aging Dir­ect­or of Delta Lo­gic Auto­mat­is­ier­ung­s­tech­nik GmbH, com­men­ted: “I see Soft­ing as the ideal com­pany to com­pet­ently con­tin­ue our product line. I am con­vinced that the suc­cess­ful de­vel­op­ment that has char­ac­ter­ized Delta Lo­gic since its found­ing in 1993 will con­tin­ue un­der Soft­ing’s lead­er­ship.”

HI­MA Group, a lead­ing pro­vider of safety-re­lated auto­ma­tion solu­tions, has con­tin­ued its sig­ni­fic­ant growth path in the fisc­al year 2024. Rev­en­ue in­creased to EUR 186 mil­lion, driv­en largely by in­ter­na­tion­al ex­pan­sion and an in­creas­ing fo­cus on di­git­al solu­tions. Fol­low­ing an already very suc­cess­ful fisc­al year 2023, the HI­MA Group con­tin­ued its growth mo­mentum in 2024. Rev­en­ue rose by 23 per­cent, from EUR 151 mil­lion in 2023 to EUR 186 mil­lion in 2024. Or­gan­ic growth was 12 per­cent in 2024.

Jörg de la Motte, CEO of HI­MA Group, said, “With the ac­quis­i­tion of Sella Con­trols and Origo Solu­tions in 2023 and 2024, we have brought new ex­pert­ise in­to the com­pany and strengthened our mar­ket po­s­i­tion as a key solu­tions pro­vider. In ad­di­tion, we have fur­ther ex­pan­ded our op­er­a­tions out­side Europe to sup­port de­mand­ing cus­tom­er projects loc­ally.”

In Europe, 24 per­cent of sales were gen­er­ated from Ger­many, Aus­tria and Switzer­land, 19 per­cent from oth­er EU coun­tries, 11 per­cent from the United King­dom, and 9 per­cent from Nor­way. The Asia-Pa­cific re­gion con­trib­uted 19 per­cent to sales, fol­lowed by the Middle East and In­dia with 12 per­cent and the Amer­icas with 6 per­cent.

Dr. Mi­chael Löbig, CFO of HI­MA Group, said, “The en­cour­aging sales per­form­ance is a clear sig­nal of the vi­ab­il­ity of our busi­ness mod­el. We ex­pect fur­ther sales growth in the cur­rent year, al­though the mar­ket en­vir­on­ment re­mains chal­len­ging, par­tic­u­larly in Ger­many.”

Rail­way sec­tor wit­nessed strong growth

In 2024, HI­MA re­cor­ded sub­stan­tial growth, par­tic­u­larly in the rail­way sec­tor, with one of the reas­ons be­ing new cus­tom­er projects sup­por­ted by Sella Con­trols. The rail­way in­dustry now ac­counts for 17 per­cent of sales. An ex­pan­ded product and solu­tion port­fo­lio was presen­ted for the first time at In­no­Trans 2024. It was very well re­ceived by trade vis­it­ors, par­tic­u­larly be­cause of its high flex­ib­il­ity, easy in­teg­ra­tion, cost ef­fi­ciency, and abil­ity to pro­mote the di­git­al trans­form­a­tion of rail­way trans­port.

In­ter­na­tion­al ex­pan­sion con­tin­ues

Fol­low­ing the open­ing of a new sub­si­di­ary in Saudi Ar­a­bia in 2023, an­oth­er was es­tab­lished in In­dia in Novem­ber 2024. In ad­di­tion, new sales of­fices and ser­vice cen­ters were opened in sev­er­al coun­tries. In China, for ex­ample, a new ser­vice cen­ter com­menced op­er­a­tions in Zhanji­ang to bet­ter serve cus­tom­ers in the south­east­ern part of the coun­try. In ad­di­tion, a sub­si­di­ary was opened in Colom­bia, and a branch is planned in Peru. Fur­ther ex­pan­sion in these growth mar­kets is planned to sup­port large and de­mand­ing cus­tom­er projects loc­ally. In re­gions where the HI­MA Group does not have a dir­ect pres­ence, the part­ner pro­gram has been fur­ther ex­pan­ded.

“With these in­vest­ments in high-growth re­gions, we are fur­ther ex­pand­ing our cus­tom­er prox­im­ity and strength­en­ing our in­ter­na­tion­al po­s­i­tion,” ad­ded Jörg de la Motte.

In­vest­ments in di­git­al­iz­a­tion and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI)

The port­fo­lio has been ex­pan­ded to in­clude new di­git­al solu­tions such as cock­pits for con­trolling safety li­fe­cycle man­age­ment, SCADA+, and safeHMI. The safeHMI, de­veloped in part­ner­ship with DEUTA-Werke, re­places clas­sic, hard-wired visu­al­iz­a­tion solu­tions with se­cure, flex­ible con­trol pan­els. The long-stand­ing co­oper­a­tion with se­cur­ity spe­cial­ist gen­ua has also been fur­ther in­tens­i­fied in or­der to strengthen the re­si­li­ence of auto­ma­tion sys­tems against cy­ber threats.

Jörg de la Motte said, “Our strategy with a clear fo­cus on di­git­al­iz­a­tion un­der the motto #safety­goes­di­git­al is pay­ing off. With our di­git­al cock­pits for con­trolling safety li­fe­cycle man­age­ment, safeHMI, and SCADA+, we of­fer our cus­tom­ers real ad­ded value.”

HI­MA Group is in­creas­ingly fo­cus­ing on AI-based in­nov­a­tions and has ex­pan­ded its own in­nov­a­tion lab, ‘hi­m­alaya’, in Man­nheim to ac­com­mod­ate this. Solu­tions de­veloped here that are already in pi­lot use in­clude AI-sup­por­ted re­mote dia­gnos­is, which de­tects an­om­alies in safety con­trol sys­tems at an early stage and en­ables pro­act­ive main­ten­ance. The com­pany’s in­tern­al chat­bot, ‘Ask Paula‘, which spe­cial­izes in func­tion­al safety, will be in­tro­duced in June 2025.

Dr. Mi­chael Löbig said, “AI has great po­ten­tial for HI­MA Group, both in­tern­ally and ex­tern­ally. Our in­nov­a­tion lab, ‘hi­m­alaya’, is the right place to quickly identi­fy and tap in­to ap­plic­a­tions and po­ten­tial.”

Sus­tain­ab­il­ity as a pri­or­ity

"At HI­MA Group, sus­tain­ab­il­ity is a cent­ral com­pon­ent of our cor­por­ate philo­sophy and serves to se­cure the fu­ture of our com­pany," ex­plains Stef­fen Phil­ipp, Man­aging Part­ner of HI­MA Group. 

This is par­tic­u­larly evid­ent in the re­spons­ible use of re­sources and the pro­tec­tion of people and the en­vir­on­ment. To op­er­ate suc­cess­fully and re­spons­ibly in the long term, HI­MA pur­sues eco­nom­ic, eco­lo­gic­al, and so­cial goals. These in­clude par­ti­cip­a­tion in sus­tain­ab­il­ity ini­ti­at­ives, the es­tab­lish­ment of a glob­al CSRD team, sus­tain­able loc­a­tion and trade fair con­cepts, as well as ideas com­pet­i­tions and awards for par­tic­u­larly suc­cess­fully im­ple­men­ted projects.

"For every cus­tom­er feed­back, HI­MA makes a con­tri­bu­tion to tree plant­ing and thus makes an act­ive con­tri­bu­tion to en­vir­on­ment­al pro­tec­tion," adds Dr. Mi­chael Löbig.

The new plant of­fers pro­duc­tion and lo­gist­ics area of around 10,000 m². The new SENSILO plant for the pro­duc­tion of tem­per­at­ure and pres­sure sensors has a pro­duc­tion and lo­gist­ics area of around 10,000 m². JUMO also sees great po­ten­tial here in the com­ing years. At around 48 mil­lion euros, the new build­ing is the largest in­vest­ment in JUMO's his­tory. In ad­di­tion, around 21 mil­lion euros will be in­ves­ted in ma­chines and sys­tems by 2027.

“The plant is an in­vest­ment of mil­lions in the fu­ture of the group of com­pan­ies and a com­mit­ment to the Fulda eco­nom­ic re­gion and, above all, to our cus­tom­ers,” em­phas­ized Man­aging Dir­ect­or Dr. Stef­fen Hoßfeld. He ex­pressly thanked the city of Fulda and the dis­trict of Fulda. “The co­oper­a­tion with the au­thor­it­ies was con­sist­ently solu­tion-ori­ented, un­bur­eau­crat­ic and based on part­ner­ship. This helped us a great deal and was a de­cis­ive factor in our abil­ity to real­ize this project so quickly,” said Hoßfeld.

In­teg­rated project man­age­ment as the basis for suc­cess
Project man­ager Stefan Reith at­trib­uted the fact that the new build­ing was com­pleted on time and with­in budget to the in­teg­rated project man­age­ment. With this meth­od, all parties in­volved, in­clud­ing con­struc­tion and trade con­tract­ors, are brought on board at an early stage of the plan­ning pro­cess with a fo­cus on work­ing in a team with all com­pan­ies in­volved.

Reith thanked ar­chi­tect Marco Schlothauer (Er­furt) as well as the JUMO share­hold­ers, man­age­ment, works coun­cil and all em­ploy­ees for their sup­port.

JUMO not only wants to set stand­ards with the high-qual­ity work­ing en­vir­on­ment for the staff and the products they are de­liv­er­ing to the glob­al mar­kets but also with the en­ergy concept of the new plant: 
Part of the in­stall­a­tions are:

• a 700 kW photo­vol­ta­ic sys­tem on the roof (equi­val­ent to the av­er­age re­quire­ments of ap­prox. 200 single-fam­ily homes);
•  20 geo­therm­al probes with a depth of 100 m each on the 100,000 m2 site (av­er­age geo­therm­al en­ergy at a depth of 1000 m ap­prox. 10 °C);
• 1.2 MW/h cool­ing ca­pa­city for build­ing air con­di­tion­ing (cor­res­ponds to the cool­ing ca­pa­city of ap­prox. 2000 cars);
• full-sur­face in­dus­tri­al un­der­floor heat­ing on over 8500 m² (com­par­is­on: soc­cer pitch 7140 m²);
• ef­fi­cient heat re­cov­ery from pro­duc­tion pro­cesses.

With this ver­sat­ile en­ergy concept means that no fossil fuels are used. JUMO thus not only sig­ni­fic­antly re­duces its own CO₂ foot­print, but also sup­ports its cus­tom­ers in re­du­cing costs and emis­sions with JUMO products and solu­tions.

Thanks to JUMO for the in­vit­a­tion and the op­por­tun­ity to have a look at this pos­it­ive ex­ample of en­tre­pren­eur­i­al com­mit­ment and ded­ic­a­tion to the Ger­man in­dustry in times that are not easy for the Ger­man eco­nomy. 
 

Lead­ing vendor of em­bed­ded and edge com­put­ing tech­no­logy con­g­atec an­nounced it is ex­tend­ing its co­oper­a­tion with Kon­tron – a lead­ing glob­al sup­pli­er of IoT tech­no­logy – to add Kon­tron to con­g­atec's ex­ist­ing part­ners for man­u­fac­tur­ing Com­puter-on-Mod­ules. This co­oper­a­tion is an im­port­ant ele­ment of con­g­atec’s loc­al for loc­al ap­proach to in­crease ef­fi­ciency in the light of in­ter­na­tion­al trade dis­rup­tions and grow­ing cus­tom­er de­mand driv­en by geo­pol­it­ic­al con­sid­er­a­tions.

con­g­atec gains ac­cess to Kon­tron's broad in­ter­na­tion­al pro­duc­tion net­work of over 20 plants in dif­fer­ent con­fig­ur­a­tions, lever­aging Kon­tron's ex­pert­ise in SMT as­sembly. By mak­ing use of Kon­tron’s loc­al pro­duc­tion fa­cil­it­ies in the United States, con­g­atec ex­pects sig­ni­fic­ant cost ad­vant­ages and avoid­ance of tar­iffs in­to the USA. Fur­ther­more, con­g­atec will util­ize Kon­tron’s sup­ply chain man­age­ment, pro­duc­tion, and lo­gist­ics cap­ab­il­it­ies to fur­ther en­hance its glob­al reach and loc­al pres­ence in all re­gions of the world. 

“The man­u­fac­tur­ing co­oper­a­tion with Kon­tron is a nat­ur­al move, as both com­pan­ies share the same val­ues and in­nov­at­ive tech­no­logy roadmap with power­ful part­ner­ships with lead­ing sil­ic­on vendors in­clud­ing In­tel, AMD, Qual­comm, Texas In­stru­ments, and NXP,” ex­plains Kon­rad Gar­ham­mer, COO and CTO of con­g­atec. “Based on our broad Com­puter-on-Mod­ules port­fo­li­os, we both serve the highest cus­tom­er re­quire­ments in de­mand­ing in­dus­tries, in­clud­ing med­ic­al, in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion, ro­bot­ics and em­bed­ded edge com­put­ing for trans­port­a­tion, avion­ics and in-vehicle.”

Co­oper­a­tion ex­pec­ted to ex­pand in the near fu­ture

“With Kon­tron sub­si­di­ary JUMP­tec and con­g­atec both be­ing lead­ing de­velopers of em­bed­ded mod­ules for the stand­ards COM Ex­press, COM-HPC, SMARC Mod­ule, and Qsev­en, we are plan­ning to ex­tend our co­oper­a­tion to oth­er areas in the near fu­ture,” adds Dr. Domin­ik Reßing, CEO of con­g­atec. “Cur­rently we are dis­cuss­ing po­ten­tial part­ner­ships for de­vel­op­ment, know-how ex­change, and joint sales and mar­ket­ing activ­it­ies that could, sub­ject to reach­ing an agree­ment, also lead to a cap­it­al in­vest­ment of con­g­atec in JUMP­tec.”
 

Sol­id-state bat­ter­ies are con­sidered a key tech­no­logy for the fu­ture: they can store more en­ergy and do not rely on flam­mable ma­ter­i­als like cur­rent lith­i­um-ion bat­ter­ies. Re­search­ers at TUM and TU­Mint.En­ergy Re­search in Mu­nich have now taken a sig­ni­fic­ant step to­wards im­prov­ing sol­id-state bat­ter­ies. They de­veloped a new ma­ter­i­al made of lith­i­um, an­ti­mony and scan­di­um that con­ducts lith­i­um ions more than 30% faster than any pre­vi­ously known ma­ter­i­al.

The team led by Prof. Thomas F. Fässler from the Chair of In­or­gan­ic Chem­istry with a Fo­cus on Nov­el Ma­ter­i­als par­tially re­placed lith­i­um in a lith­i­um an­ti­monide com­pound with the met­al scan­di­um. This cre­ates spe­cif­ic gaps, so-called va­can­cies, in the crys­tal lat­tice of the con­duct­or ma­ter­i­al. These gaps help the lith­i­um ions to move more eas­ily and faster, res­ult­ing in a new world re­cord for ion con­duct­iv­ity.

Since the meas­ured con­duct­iv­ity far ex­ceeded that of ex­ist­ing ma­ter­i­als, the team col­lab­or­ated with the Chair of Tech­nic­al Elec­tro­chem­istry un­der Prof. Hubert Gasteiger at TUM to con­firm the res­ult. Co-au­thor To­bi­as Kutsch who con­duc­ted the val­id­a­tion tests, com­men­ted: “Be­cause the ma­ter­i­al also con­ducts elec­tri­city, it presen­ted a spe­cial chal­lenge, and we had to ad­apt our meas­ure­ment meth­ods ac­cord­ingly.”

Fässler sees great po­ten­tial for the new ma­ter­i­al: "Our res­ult cur­rently rep­res­ents a sig­ni­fic­ant ad­vance in ba­sic re­search. By in­cor­por­at­ing small amounts of scan­di­um, we have un­covered a new prin­ciple that could prove to be a blue­print for oth­er ele­ment­al com­bin­a­tions. While many tests are still needed be­fore the ma­ter­i­al can be used in bat­tery cells, we are op­tim­ist­ic. Ma­ter­i­als that con­duct both ions and elec­trons are par­tic­u­larly well suited as ad­dit­ives in elec­trodes. Be­cause of the prom­ising prac­tic­al ap­plic­a­tions, we’ve already filed a pat­ent for our de­vel­op­ment." In ad­di­tion to its faster con­duct­iv­ity, the ma­ter­i­al also of­fers thermal sta­bil­ity and can be pro­duced us­ing well-es­tab­lished chem­ic­al meth­ods.

The re­search­ers have even dis­covered an en­tirely new class of sub­stances through their work, as first au­thor Jing­wen Ji­ang, sci­ent­ist at TU­Mint.En­ergy Re­search, em­phas­izes: "Our com­bin­a­tion con­sists of lith­i­um-an­ti­mony, but the same concept can eas­ily be ap­plied to lith­i­um-phos­phor­us sys­tems. While the pre­vi­ous re­cord hold­er re­lied on lith­i­um-sul­phur and re­quired five ad­di­tion­al ele­ments for op­tim­iz­a­tion, we only need only Scan­di­um as an ad­di­tion­al com­pon­ent. We be­lieve that our dis­cov­ery could have broad­er im­plic­a­tions for en­han­cing con­duct­iv­ity in a wide range of oth­er ma­ter­i­als."

Pub­lic­a­tion: Jing­wen Ji­ang, To­bi­as Kutsch, Wil­helm Klein, Manuel Botta, Anatoliy Seny­shyn, Robert J. Spranger, Volodymyr Baran, Leo van Wüllen, Hubert A. Gasteiger, Thomas F. Fässler: Scan­di­um In­duced Struc­tur­al Dis­order and Va­cancy En­gin­eer­ing in Li3Sb – Su­per­i­or Ion­ic Con­duct­iv­ity in Li3−3xScxSbv, pub­lished in: Ad­vanced En­ergy Ma­ter­i­als, 2025, 2500683 ht­tps://doi.org/10.100....202500683
 

Menlo Mi­crosys­tems is an­noun­cing a new scal­able power switch­ing ar­chi­tec­ture that en­ables its Ideal Switch® to be de­ployed in ad­vanced power dis­tri­bu­tion and con­trol sys­tems to 10MW and bey­ond. The new ar­chi­tec­ture was show­cased as a demon­stra­tion at PCIM 2025 in Nurem­burg from May 6-8.

The demon­stra­tion sys­tem, which was ex­hib­ited in Europe for the first time, is based on the MM9200, a 300V, 10A Mi­cro­Elec­tro Mech­an­ic­al Sys­tems (MEMS) switch. It util­izes Menlo’s Ideal Switch tech­no­logy to provide an ul­tra-low on-res­ist­ance, met­al-on-met­al con­tact to elim­in­ate wasted power. The MM9200 is a high-power SPST mi­cro-elec­tromech­an­ic­al re­lay that is smal­ler, more ef­fi­cient and has high­er per­form­ance than equi­val­ent sol­id-state re­lay (SSR) and elec­tro-mech­an­ic­al re­lay (EMR) al­tern­at­ives. 

The demon­stra­tion rep­lic­ates an in­nov­at­ive use case for the MM9200 in a real-world ap­plic­a­tion cur­rently be­ing de­signed for the U.S. Navy. It will be de­ployed in one of the world’s most ad­vanced cir­cuit break­ers, sup­port­ing up to 1,000V and 10,000A. This im­port­ant proof of concept opens up a wide range of power con­trol and pro­tec­tion ap­plic­a­tions, from mil­li­watts to mega­watts, lever­aging Menlo’s world-lead­ing Ideal Switch tech­no­logy.

Hot-swap­able solu­tion

Ar­rays of MM9200 switches are con­figured for mi­cro­second speed pro­tec­tion in 1000V / 125A mod­ules. Four mod­ules are com­bined in­to hot-swap­able sys­tems, and mul­tiple sys­tems are de­ployed in par­al­lel to scale to ac­com­mod­ate high­er power re­quire­ments.

Un­like oth­er solu­tions, the neg­li­gible power dis­sip­a­tion of the Ideal Switch re­moves the need for design com­prom­ises to ac­com­mod­ate heat man­age­ment while sim­ul­tan­eously en­abling power man­age­ment and con­trol sys­tems to be con­struc­ted in a frac­tion of the space. 

Menlo Mi­cro CEO Russ Gar­cia said, “Our MEMS products provide highly re­li­able per­form­ance be­cause they are well es­tab­lished and based on ex­ist­ing semi­con­duct­or man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cesses. Our products are based on a unit cell ar­chi­tec­ture that can scale across low and me­di­um voltage power con­trol ap­plic­a­tion needs. We have an ex­cit­ing col­lab­or­a­tion with the U.S. Navy on the de­vel­op­ment of fu­ture ad­vance cir­cuit break­ers.”

Gar­cia ad­ded, “In ad­di­tion to de­fense ap­plic­a­tions, we are en­ga­ging cus­tom­ers across power con­trol and pro­tec­tion ap­plic­a­tions with our MM9200 solu­tion. As we com­mer­cial­ize this plat­form fur­ther, we an­ti­cip­ate scaled ad­op­tion across many ma­jor mar­kets, in­clud­ing fact­ory auto­ma­tion, data cen­ters, smart grid in­fra­struc­tures, EV char­ging in­fra­struc­ture, build­ing man­age­ment and much more.”
 

Am­mo­nia has been tra­di­tion­ally known for fer­til­izer pro­duc­tion. In the fu­ture, it could also play a key role in the En­ergy Trans­ition as an ef­fi­cient source of hy­dro­gen and a cli­mate-friendly sub­sti­tute for fossil fuels since it can be pro­duced from ni­tro­gen and hy­dro­gen with zero car­bon emis­sions. Fur­ther­more, am­mo­nia of­fers a wealth of ad­vant­ages in terms of trans­port­a­tion and stor­age. The Fraunhofer In­sti­tute for Mi­croen­gin­eer­ing and Mi­crosys­tems IMM is work­ing on a space-sav­ing, ef­fi­cient and, above all, de­cent­ral­ized am­mo­nia crack­ing tech­no­logy in nu­mer­ous re­search projects.

“Am­mo­nia has very bright pro­spects for the sus­tain­able trans­form­a­tion of our en­ergy sys­tem,” ex­plains Gun­ther Kolb, Head of the En­ergy Di­vi­sion and deputy in­sti­tute dir­ect­or of Fraunhofer IMM in Mainz. “Pro­du­cing suf­fi­cient en­ergy without emis­sions isn’t the only chal­lenge in­volved in the En­ergy Trans­ition, after all. Be­cause large amounts of green elec­tri­city can be pro­duced mainly in places with a lot of wind or sun, like Chile and Aus­tralia, low-loss trans­port­a­tion to areas with less re­new­able en­ergy avail­able is in­deed an im­port­ant factor.” Us­ing am­mo­nia can bring trans­form­at­ive ad­vant­ages in this re­gard.

Per­fectly suited to hy­dro­gen stor­age and trans­port­a­tion 

Green hy­dro­gen (H₂), com­bines with ni­tro­gen (N₂ ) in a 3:1 ra­tio to pro­duce am­mo­nia (NH₃) and en­ergy stored and trans­por­ted in this form (i.e. am­mo­nia) un­der­goes lower losses in the sup­ply chain. Moreover, am­mo­nia has a few ad­vant­ages over hy­dro­gen for the stor­age of elec­tri­city. It re­mains li­quid at at­mo­spher­ic pres­sure and even at a pres­sure of just 7.5 bar or when it cools to only about -33°C. By con­trast, li­que­fy­ing pure hy­dro­gen re­quires feed­ing it in­to a va­cu­um at low pres­sure and lower­ing the tem­per­at­ure to -253°C, which re­quires much en­ergy. In ad­di­tion, am­mo­nia has a high­er volu­met­ric en­ergy dens­ity than li­quid hy­dro­gen, so it can carry more en­ergy per unit volume. 

“Gen­er­at­ing am­mo­nia from hy­dro­gen and ni­tro­gen only re­quires about five per­cent more en­ergy than gen­er­at­ing hy­dro­gen from green elec­tri­city,” Kolb ex­plains. “And both pro­du­cing and crack­ing am­mo­nia are al­most com­pletely car­bon-free.” Am­mo­nia is tox­ic and flam­mable, so it is clas­si­fied as haz­ard­ous and sub­ject to strin­gent reg­u­la­tions. Thanks to the ex­ist­ing high safety stand­ards, some 25 mil­lion met­ric tons of am­mo­nia are cur­rently trans­por­ted safely world­wide by ship and rail each year, chiefly for fer­til­izer pro­duc­tion.

Core hy­dro­gen net­work un­der de­vel­op­ment

Am­mo­nia must be re­con­ver­ted in­to its ori­gin­al com­pounds (i.e.ni­tro­gen and hy­dro­gen) for use in the chem­ic­al in­dustry or as an en­ergy source. Equally im­port­ant, this needs to be done with min­im­al en­ergy losses. Am­mo­nia in gas form is fed in­to a re­act­or at a tem­per­at­ure of about 600 de­grees Celsi­us, in which it comes in­to con­tact with an in­or­gan­ic nick­el-based cata­lyst with large in­tern­al sur­face. “Right now, the first big elec­tro­lys­is fa­cil­it­ies are be­ing built in loc­a­tions rich in green elec­tri­city, like Aus­tralia and Chile, to pro­duce am­mo­nia. On the European side, one of the first ma­jor crack­ing fa­cil­it­ies is un­der con­struc­tion in Rot­ter­dam at the same time, for ex­ample,” Kolb says. The plan is to sup­ply hy­dro­gen to places where it is needed via pipelines. The primary is­sue is that many po­ten­tial cus­tom­ers, es­pe­cially SMEs, lack ac­cess to hy­dro­gen pipelines. Ger­many’s hy­dro­gen in­fra­struc­ture is cur­rently be­ing built out. Plans call for a core hy­dro­gen net­work com­pris­ing about 9,000 kilo­met­ers of pipelines in total to be put in place by 2032, primar­ily by con­vert­ing nat­ur­al gas lines. However, even after that, large areas will not be con­nec­ted to the hy­dro­gen sup­ply.

Loc­al sup­ply through de­cent­ral­ized crack­ing tech­no­logy

“Our de­cent­ral­ized crack­ing tech­no­logy can close this sup­ply gap both ef­fi­ciently and with zero emis­sions for re­quired quant­it­ies of between 100 kilo­grams and 10 met­ric tons of hy­dro­gen per day,” Kolb ex­plains. “In the AM­MON­PAK­T­OR project, which re­ceived fund­ing from the state of Rhine­land-Palat­in­ate, we teamed up with the Fraunhofer In­sti­tute for In­dus­tri­al Math­em­at­ics IT­WM to de­vel­op a com­pact am­mo­nia crack­er that achieves an ef­fi­ciency of 90 per­cent dur­ing the re­con­ver­sion pro­cess through our in­nov­at­ive plate heat ex­changer tech­no­logy and in­teg­rated ex­haust gas com­bus­tion from the pres­sure swing ad­sorp­tion used for clean­ing, in com­par­is­on to 70 per­cent for con­ven­tion­al tech­no­lo­gies.”

The en­ergy needed to heat the re­act­or is gen­er­ated dir­ectly in the crack­ing re­act­or with the help of the ex­haust gas streams, so no ad­di­tion­al fuel or elec­tri­city is re­quired for crack­ing pur­poses. The AM­MON­PAK­T­OR re­act­or is also about 90 per­cent smal­ler than con­ven­tion­al tech­no­logy. This is es­pe­cially im­port­ant for mo­bile and space-con­strained ap­plic­a­tions. The use of ex­haust gas also means the tech­no­logy has a smal­ler car­bon foot­print than elec­tric­ally heated re­act­or con­cepts. “Aside from the sys­tem’s in­tern­al ex­haust gas util­iz­a­tion, the in­nov­at­ive plate heat ex­changer from Fraunhofer IMM, which is dir­ectly coated with a cata­lyst, makes all the dif­fer­ence,” Kolb says. “In­stead of the con­ven­tion­al meth­od of gen­er­at­ing the heat re­quired for crack­ing in a pipe sys­tem heated from the out­side at about 900 de­grees Celsi­us, which re­quires much en­ergy, our tech­no­logy gen­er­ates the heat right where it is needed, so our sys­tem has much bet­ter heat trans­fer. And that works out to huge en­ergy sav­ings.”

A fin­ished pro­to­type at Fraunhofer IMM’s loc­a­tion in Mainz already en­ables hy­dro­gen pro­duc­tion of about 75 kg per day, about the same as the daily out­put from a 50-kilo­watt fuel cell. “That volume alone would be enough to sup­ply a small hy­dro­gen filling sta­tion, for ex­ample,” Kolb notes. The next de­vel­op­ment goal, for now, is scal­ing up to daily pro­duc­tion of up to 10 met­ric tons, in­clud­ing as part of the EU’s five-year mari­time project GAMMA and the Fraunhofer flag­ship project Am­mon­Vek­t­or, which is ex­plor­ing the en­tire green am­mo­nia value chain to make hy­dro­gen avail­able on a de­cent­ral­ized basis and at as low cost as pos­sible. This three-year project, headed by the Fraunhofer In­sti­tute for En­vir­on­ment­al, Safety, and En­ergy Tech­no­logy UM­SICHT, has been un­der way since early 2024.
 

As a mu­ni­cip­al util­ity with around 1,100 em­ploy­ees, Stadtwerke Karls­ruhe sup­plies more than 400,000 people with elec­tri­city, nat­ur­al gas, dis­trict heat­ing, and drink­ing wa­ter – in­clud­ing the GartenCarée site in Karls­ruhe, whose cool­ing sys­tem is op­er­ated by the util­ity. In ad­di­tion to res­id­en­tial units and of­fice spaces, the build­ing com­plex also houses a data cen­ter, med­ic­al prac­tices, re­tail shops and res­taur­ants. The GartenCarée cool­ing sys­tem con­sists of three ab­sorp­tion chillers powered by en­vir­on­ment­ally friendly dis­trict heat­ing such as pro­cess waste heat from a nearby re­finery, as well as a mech­an­ic­al com­pres­sion chiller with two com­pressors and a cool­ing tower. "When it came to the en­ergy con­sump­tion of our sys­tem, we were more or less fly­ing blind," re­calls Jürgen Weiß, Head of Con­struc­tion Man­age­ment and Tech­no­logy at Stadtwerke Karls­ruhe, de­scrib­ing the situ­ation be­fore the solu­tion was im­ple­men­ted. "At the end of the year, all we could see was how many mega­watt-hours of cool­ing we had pro­duced and how much elec­tri­city and dis­trict heat­ing we had used to achieve it – noth­ing more, noth­ing less."

Project Goal: Great­er Trans­par­ency and Ef­fi­ciency in Re­fri­ger­a­tion

That was about to change. Stadtwerke Karls­ruhe set out to identi­fy and real­ize po­ten­tial en­ergy sav­ings. “To that end, we im­ple­men­ted an auto­mated en­ergy sys­tem man­age­ment solu­tion to­geth­er with the pro­vider, which en­ables bet­ter con­trol of the in­di­vidu­al com­pon­ents and provides de­tailed mon­it­or­ing and ana­lys­is,” ex­plains Weiß. “As a res­ult, all en­ergy flows are now vis­ible in de­tail, and op­tim­iz­a­tions can be im­ple­men­ted and ana­lyzed dir­ectly. The trans­par­ency we’ve gained is a ma­jor ad­vant­age.” The sys­tem meas­ures and ana­lyzes para­met­ers such as the flow rate of chilled and cool­ing wa­ter, or­ches­trates them to max­im­ize sys­tem ef­fi­ciency and de­term­ines wheth­er it is more eco­nom­ic­al to op­er­ate the chillers or use free cool­ing de­pend­ing on the out­door tem­per­at­ure. One ex­ample: pumps run­ning con­stantly at 100 per­cent flow, even when 60 per­cent – or less – would be suf­fi­cient de­pend­ing on con­di­tions, present sig­ni­fic­ant po­ten­tial for im­proved ef­fi­ciency and en­ergy sav­ings.

A com­mon chal­lenge in re­fri­ger­a­tion sys­tems is that pumps and cool­ing towers of­ten con­sume as much elec­tri­city as the chillers them­selves—without this be­ing de­tec­ted. Moreover, en­ergy op­tim­iz­a­tion typ­ic­ally oc­curs only at the com­pon­ent level and is of­ten based on a single op­er­at­ing con­di­tion defined dur­ing sys­tem plan­ning. However, this con­di­tion ac­counts for less than three per­cent of total op­er­at­ing hours. The res­ult is un­ne­ces­sary elec­tri­city con­sump­tion dur­ing a large por­tion of sys­tem runtime. Achiev­ing ef­fi­ciency gains through im­proved in­ter­ac­tion between com­pon­ents is the spe­cialty of Factor4Solutions.

After Six Months: 20 Per­cent Less an­nu­al Elec­tri­city Con­sump­tion and Five-Fig­ure Cost Sav­ings

The in­tel­li­gent soft­ware from Factor4Solutions ana­lyzes the op­er­a­tion of all com­pon­ents rel­ev­ant to the cool­ing sys­tem as a whole – in­clud­ing all com­pon­ents’ en­ergy con­sump­tion. To do this, the solu­tion uses di­git­al twins of both the in­di­vidu­al com­pon­ents and the en­tire cool­ing sys­tem, al­low­ing it to cal­cu­late in real time, or on de­mand, how each com­pon­ent must be­have to sup­port the as­sembly of com­pon­ents and to max­im­ize over­all sys­tem ef­fi­ciency.

As a res­ult, chillers and aux­il­i­ary equip­ment are no longer con­trolled in a fixed se­quence based on base and peak load lo­gic. In­stead, they are op­er­ated dy­nam­ic­ally and ef­fi­ciency-based, de­pend­ing on weath­er con­di­tions and re­quired cool­ing out­put, via stand­ard­ized sys­tem man­age­ment pro­to­cols. This en­sures the sys­tem runs at max­im­um ef­fi­ciency un­der all load con­di­tions.

The Stadtwerke Karls­ruhe team was able to con­firm the sys­tem’s ef­fect­ive­ness right after the test phase ended. “In just those six months alone, we re­duced an­nu­al elec­tri­city con­sump­tion for cool­ing by more than 20 per­cent, which trans­lates to fin­an­cial sav­ings in the five-di­git range,” says Weiß with sat­is­fac­tion. And that’s likely just the be­gin­ning. Over the course of a full year, there is still sig­ni­fic­ant op­tim­iz­a­tion po­ten­tial - es­pe­cially since the ef­fi­ciency of the colling sys­tem’s vari­ous com­pon­ents in­ter­act dif­fer­ently de­pend­ing on sea­son­al tem­per­at­ure changes and cool­ing de­mand.

Weiß is con­fid­ent: “The oth­er six months, the sys­tem was still run­ning un­der our con­ven­tion­al con­trol lo­gic. That means we can save sig­ni­fic­antly more en­ergy. Ac­cord­ing to cal­cu­la­tions from Factor4Solutions, we’re look­ing at sav­ings of over 40 per­cent. And that’s ex­actly what we’re aim­ing for.”

100 Per­cent Op­er­a­tion­al Re­li­ab­il­ity

An­oth­er ma­jor be­ne­fit for Stadtwerke Karls­ruhe is the fact that the sys­tem – both hard­ware and soft­ware – con­tin­ues to be mon­itored, main­tained, and op­tim­ized by the pro­vider after in­stall­a­tion. Weiß com­ments: “Of course, we mon­it­or the sys­tem ourselves, but hav­ing the ex­pert team at Factor4Solutions op­er­ate it via AI-sup­por­ted re­mote ac­cess is a huge ad­vant­age for us. Their in-depth ex­pert­ise in re­fri­ger­a­tion tech­no­logy en­sures that we’re im­me­di­ately in­formed if any­thing isn’t work­ing as it should.”

Thanks to the use of di­git­al twins and real-time data com­par­is­on, Factor4Solutions can even no­ti­fy its cus­tom­ers in ad­vance of an­om­alies and po­ten­tial fail­ures, al­low­ing these to be pre­ven­ted pro­act­ively through pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance.

“Guar­an­teed op­er­a­tion­al re­li­ab­il­ity at all times is ab­so­lutely crit­ic­al for us be­cause we’re ob­lig­ated to sup­ply cool­ing,” ex­plains Weiß. “At GartenCarée, we’re not just provid­ing cool­ing for of­fices and apart­ments—but also for a data cen­ter, among oth­ers.”

When asked about the im­ple­ment­a­tion phase, Weiß notes: “Everything went smoothly. In col­lab­or­a­tion with the ser­vice pro­vider re­spons­ible for our meas­ure­ment and con­trol sys­tems, we provided the ne­ces­sary data points that the vendor re­quired to set up the solu­tion. Factor4Solutions, who man­age the sys­tem re­motely from Ber­lin, had already told us in ad­vance which data points were needed – such as flow rates, tem­per­at­ures, and en­ergy meters for heat­ing and cool­ing.” Once that was done, things moved quickly: the soft­ware was con­figured with­in a single day, and the first ana­lys­is was avail­able with­in four to six weeks. Based on that ini­tial data, it be­came clear which ad­di­tion­al data points would be help­ful, and the sys­tem was fine-tuned ac­cord­ingly. This simple, stream­lined in­stall­a­tion pro­cess makes the solu­tion at­tract­ive across in­dus­tries – any­where cool­ing sys­tems are used.

Rap­id Pay­back Sup­ports Ex­pan­sion of the Part­ner­ship

It be­came clear right after the test phase: “All I had to do was com­pare the an­nu­al en­ergy con­sump­tion and cool­ing out­put to the pre­vi­ous year to see the sig­ni­fic­ant in­crease in ef­fi­ciency and the en­ergy sav­ings,” says Weiß. The team lead­er is also very sat­is­fied with the sys­tem’s re­turn on in­vest­ment: “The an­nu­al cost of work­ing with the re­fri­ger­a­tion spe­cial­ists is already off­set by the en­ergy sav­ings with­in the first five months of each year.”

It’s no sur­prise, then, that Stadtwerke Karls­ruhe is con­sid­er­ing ex­pand­ing the part­ner­ship. “We’re already hav­ing a second sys­tem man­aged by Factor4Solutions,” says Weiß. “And we op­er­ate sev­er­al oth­er cool­ing sys­tems that could also be suit­able can­did­ates.”

Since the solu­tion can be in­teg­rated in­to al­most any sys­tem, there’s a strong like­li­hood that the AI-based ap­proach will also de­liv­er valu­able in­sights and sav­ings in those cases.
 

IEN Europe: Not all of our read­ers are fa­mil­i­ar with the term “Con­nec­ted Work­er-Plat­form”. Could you please de­scribe the idea be­hind it?
Nor­man Hart­mann: A Con­nec­ted Work­er Plat­form is a di­git­al tool set that em­powers front­line work­ers in in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ments. While most di­git­al trans­form­a­tion ef­forts have his­tor­ic­ally fo­cused on ma­chines and auto­ma­tion, hu­man work­ers have re­mained on the side­lines in terms of di­git­al in­teg­ra­tion. The concept of a Con­nec­ted Work­er Plat­form changes that by provid­ing shop floor em­ploy­ees with the right in­form­a­tion at the right time, dir­ectly at the point of activ­ity. It en­ables them to per­form their jobs more ef­fi­ciently, avoid mis­takes and col­lab­or­ate bet­ter with oth­er de­part­ments. The in­teg­ra­tion of ma­chines, people and ma­ter­i­als in a uni­fied di­git­al eco­sys­tem bridges the gap between hu­mans and in­dus­tri­al IT sys­tems. Bey­ond task man­age­ment, it en­ables teams to doc­u­ment work in real time, ac­cess con­tex­tu­al data and be­ne­fit from AI-sup­por­ted as­sist­ance. It’s about cre­at­ing a closed feed­back loop. Work­ers not only re­ceive in­struc­tions but also gen­er­ate valu­able data that im­proves fu­ture pro­cesses. 

IEN Europe: What is the soft­ware and hard­ware needed for im­ple­ment­a­tion? Which role does the “In­dus­tri­al Smart­watch” play in this concept?
Nor­man Hart­mann: We star­ted out with the in­dus­tri­al smart­watch be­cause ex­per­i­enced work­ers usu­ally know how to do their jobs. They just need to know what to do next. A smart­watch is hands-free, al­ways on the wrist, and doesn’t in­ter­fere with manu­al tasks. It was ideal for quick task dis­patch­ing, alerts and con­firm­a­tions. It also helped us com­mu­nic­ate the concept in a very tan­gible way dur­ing our early days. However, today the Work­erbase plat­form is device-ag­nost­ic. It runs on smart­watches, smart­phones, tab­lets, laptops and desktop PCs. A smart­watch is still very use­ful for spe­cif­ic use cases, but not a re­quire­ment. This flex­ib­il­ity means our solu­tion can scale with the needs and pref­er­ences of each cus­tom­er site. Wheth­er it’s main­ten­ance, lo­gist­ics or qual­ity as­sur­ance. Each role can use the device that best fits their tasks.

IEN Europe: AI is a term that is hard to avoid in the in­dus­tri­al land­scape at the mo­ment, no mat­ter where you look. How would you rate the cur­rent situ­ation re­gard­ing the use of AI in pro­duc­tion? What is your opin­ion on how things will de­vel­op in the near fu­ture?
Nor­man Hart­mann: We’re def­in­itely in the early stages of AI ad­op­tion in man­u­fac­tur­ing. There’s a lot of ex­per­i­ment­a­tion hap­pen­ing. Some of it quite prom­ising, some of it still strug­gling with real-world ap­plic­ab­il­ity. 

The big chal­lenge is that AI alone isn’t use­ful without con­text. That's why we’ve de­signed our plat­form to act as an AI en­a­bler. Com­pan­ies can in­teg­rate their pre­ferred AI en­gines, wheth­er it’s OpenAI, Gem­ini, or an in-house mod­el. What we do is provide the in­fra­struc­ture: con­tex­tu­al data from the shop floor, user in­put, task flows and his­tor­ic­al per­form­ance. With this, the AI can do mean­ing­ful things, like help­ing work­ers make bet­ter de­cisions based on past events, sum­mar­iz­ing pro­ced­ures or gen­er­at­ing doc­u­ment­a­tion auto­mat­ic­ally. Con­versely, once AI helps pro­duce struc­tured doc­u­ment­a­tion, it can then ana­lyze it to sur­face pat­terns and op­por­tun­it­ies. This two-way in­ter­ac­tion between hu­man activ­ity and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence is what un­locks real value, and we make that ac­cess­ible.

IEN Europe: What skills are needed in a com­pany and how many spe­cial­ists are needed to pre­pare and im­ple­ment a Work­er Plat­form project?
Nor­man Hart­mann: One of the most power­ful as­pects of a Con­nec­ted Work­er Plat­form is its sim­pli­city. Most tasks, like build­ing work­flows or di­git­iz­ing check­lists, can be done with no IT back­ground. It’s de­signed to be as in­tu­it­ive as writ­ing a Word doc­u­ment. This al­lows com­pan­ies to start small, ex­per­i­ment and scale at their own pace. For more ad­vanced use cases, we of­fer the abil­ity to in­teg­rate cus­tom code. This is op­tion­al and only needed if a com­pany has very spe­cif­ic re­quire­ments. At that point, col­lab­or­a­tion between do­main ex­perts and IT teams can un­lock even more po­ten­tial. In prac­tice, each fact­ory site usu­ally has at least one key user, someone who acts as the loc­al ex­pert. In lar­ger or­gan­iz­a­tions, we some­times have hun­dreds of key users across re­gions. These teams cre­ate new ap­plic­a­tions and con­tinu­ously re­fine the sys­tem. It’s a very de­cent­ral­ized and dy­nam­ic ap­proach to di­git­al trans­form­a­tion.

IEN Europe: What in­dus­tries and sec­tors cus­tom­ers come from? What are the typ­ic­al be­ne­fits and what peri­od of time can be ex­pec­ted for the re­turn of in­vest?
Nor­man Hart­mann: We ori­gin­ally star­ted in dis­crete man­u­fac­tur­ing, but today our cus­tom­ers come from vir­tu­ally every in­dustry: auto­mot­ive, elec­tron­ics, con­sumer goods, food & bever­age — you name it. The chal­lenges we solve are uni­ver­sal: bring­ing the right in­form­a­tion to work­ers, doc­u­ment­ing their ac­tions, co­ordin­at­ing across teams and ac­cel­er­at­ing on­board­ing. The re­turn on in­vest­ment is typ­ic­ally seen with­in a few months. We’ve seen com­pan­ies save mil­lions of euros by pre­vent­ing er­rors, re­du­cing down­time and stream­lin­ing pro­cesses. The plat­form im­proves trace­ab­il­ity, com­pli­ance and ef­fi­ciency, all of which con­trib­ute to a sig­ni­fic­antly more agile and re­spons­ive pro­duc­tion en­vir­on­ment. Be­cause the soft­ware in­teg­rates seam­lessly with ex­ist­ing sys­tems like ERP and MES, it doesn’t re­quire cus­tom­ers to rip and re­place. In­stead, it ex­tends their di­git­al cap­ab­il­it­ies dir­ectly to the front­line, cre­at­ing im­me­di­ate and meas­ur­able value.

IEN Europe: Can you give us one or two ex­amples of chal­lenges you solved for cus­tom­ers ?
Nor­man Hart­mann: One of the most im­pact­ful cases was with Gazelle, a lead­ing bi­cycle man­u­fac­turer. They were strug­gling with fre­quent and un­ex­plained as­sembly line stops. Pre­vi­ously, when a stop oc­curred, it was simply re­cor­ded as a bin­ary event, “stop” or “go”, with no con­text. Our sys­tem changed this by cap­tur­ing ad­di­tion­al data dir­ectly from the work­ers. Now we also re­cord the reas­ons be­hind each stop, such as work­ers not know­ing how to pro­ceed or miss­ing ma­ter­i­als. This ap­proach al­lows us to provide a dif­fer­ent level of sup­port. For in­stance, if a work­er doesn't know how to solve a prob­lem, the sys­tem can route the task to the ap­pro­pri­ate per­son to of­fer guid­ance. If miss­ing ma­ter­i­als are the is­sue, the sys­tem can auto­mat­ic­ally no­ti­fy lo­gist­ics or the sup­ply chain team to de­liv­er the re­sources. By adding con­text and trace­ab­il­ity, we were able to re­duce down­time by 35%, sig­ni­fic­antly im­prov­ing pro­duc­tion ef­fi­ciency. Fur­ther­more, by cap­tur­ing de­tailed reas­ons for each in­ter­rup­tion, we’re able to identi­fy re­cur­ring prob­lems and im­ple­ment meas­ures to pre­vent them.

An­oth­er great ex­ample comes from Bosch's SMT pro­duc­tion lines and GKN Powder Me­tal­lurgy, a com­pany which spe­cial­izes in met­al sin­ter­ing. In both cases, they con­nec­ted all their ma­chines to our plat­form. Now, when something breaks down, our sys­tem en­sures the re­pair pro­cess is handled ef­fi­ciently. It routes the prob­lem to the right ex­pert de­pend­ing on the is­sue. For ex­ample, if a ma­chine break­down oc­curs, it finds a tech­ni­cian who’s not only qual­i­fied but also avail­able and nearby. We also take care of lo­gist­ics. For in­stance, if a tech­ni­cian needs spe­cif­ic tools, the sys­tem en­sures that he knows to bring them. Our plat­form or­ches­trates mul­tiple people to handle dif­fer­ent parts of the task. Lo­gist­ics might de­liv­er the ne­ces­sary ma­ter­i­al, while the tech­ni­cian handles the ac­tu­al re­pair. This way no one has to waste time fetch­ing tools, call­ing col­leagues for help or wait­ing for parts to ar­rive. Ad­di­tion­ally, our sys­tem lever­ages AI to provide work­ers with real-time guid­ance, help­ing them com­plete tasks more ef­fi­ciently. If a new is­sue arises that hasn’t been doc­u­mented be­fore, the plat­form al­lows users to eas­ily add this prob­lem to the AI know­ledge base simply by re­cord­ing a video of the work be­ing per­formed. The AI ana­lyses the video and en­sures that in the fu­ture, work­ers can quickly ac­cess solu­tions for the new prob­lem.

IEN Europe: Thank you for these in­sights!
 

The OPC UA stand­ard is ideally suited for cre­at­ing soft­ware defin­i­tions of in­dus­tri­al pro­duc­tion fa­cil­it­ies and their devices. Ac­cord­ingly, the stand­ard is used to en­sure the in­ter­op­er­ab­il­ity of OT and IT: OPC UA serv­ers make stand­ards-com­pli­ant data avail­able, while OPC UA cli­ents ac­cess this data in stand­ard­ized ways.  

In­form­a­tion mod­els are a core concept here, as the OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els de­scribe the ser­vices and data offered by an OPC UA serv­er. The OPC UA stand­ard or­gan­izes in­form­a­tion mod­els in­to base mod­els and op­tion­al mod­el ex­ten­sions. These ex­ten­sions, which are spe­cif­ic to an in­dustry or ap­plic­a­tion do­main, are termed “com­pan­ion spe­cific­a­tions.” The OPC UA stand­ard also provides for man­u­fac­turer- and user-spe­cif­ic ex­ten­sions to base mod­els. These ex­ten­sions may op­tion­ally use com­pan­ion spe­cific­a­tions as their start­ing point. 

“OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els” is gen­er­ally syn­onym­ous with all these vari­ants and is there­fore the term routinely used in this art­icle. 

Be­ne­fits of in­form­a­tion mod­els 

As stand­ard­ized in­ter­face defin­i­tions, in­form­a­tion mod­els re­duce the ef­fort re­quired to in­teg­rate OPC UA serv­er com­pon­ents and OPC UA cli­ent com­pon­ents. De­pend­ing on the end user, this of­fers vari­ous be­ne­fits, in­clud­ing the fol­low­ing: 

• Com­pan­ion spe­cific­a­tions re­duce sys­tem in­teg­ra­tion ef­fort on the part of man­u­fac­tur­ers and users, make it easi­er to re­place devices from dif­fer­ent vendors, and ac­cel­er­ate the de­vel­op­ment of IoT ap­plic­a­tions. Some of the lar­ger and bet­ter-known com­pan­ion spe­cific­a­tions in­clude PA-DIM for pro­cess auto­ma­tion and the Wei­hen­stephan Stand­ards for the food in­dustry.   
• In cases where no suit­able com­pan­ion spe­cific­a­tions are avail­able for a spe­cif­ic solu­tion scen­ario, man­u­fac­tur­ers or users can de­vel­op ex­ten­ded OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els to suit their in­di­vidu­al re­quire­ments. In prac­tic­al terms, this is of­ten seen in situ­ations where a user needs to in­teg­rate mul­tiple sites, each run­ning dif­fer­ent devices and in­ter­faces, with a cent­ral plat­form and spe­cif­ic set of ap­plic­a­tions. An in­form­a­tion mod­el de­signed to ac­com­mod­ate their spe­cif­ic re­quire­ments can stand­ard­ize data ac­cess across all of these sites, mak­ing IoT ap­plic­a­tion de­vel­op­ment both sim­pler and more ef­fi­cient.
• The con­fig­ur­a­tion ef­fort re­quired for an IoT solu­tion can be re­duced fur­ther – and op­er­a­tions stream­lined – by com­bin­ing stand­ard­ized OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els with suit­able tech­no­lo­gies and design pat­terns.
   

Con­fig­ur­ab­il­ity and map­ping  

While ex­ten­ded in­form­a­tion mod­els of­fer many be­ne­fits, us­ing them ef­fi­ciently in prac­tice means that OPC UA serv­ers need simple and flex­ible meth­ods for hand­ling these mod­els. Ac­cord­ingly, the user needs to be able to load ar­bit­rary in­form­a­tion mod­els and map data sources to an ad­dress space in the OPC UA serv­er that cor­res­ponds to the in­form­a­tion mod­el. This map­ping func­tion­al­ity is es­sen­tial for the ef­fi­cient con­struc­tion of in­dus­tri­al data spaces in in­nov­at­ive IoT solu­tions. 

Later in this art­icle, we show how Soft­ing im­ple­ments this func­tion­al­ity in its stand­ard products. First of all, however, we will use three key as­pects to in­vest­ig­ate how an OPC UA serv­er with map­ping func­tion­al­ity can be im­ple­men­ted as part of a lar­ger IOT solu­tion and can then op­tion­ally in­ter­act with oth­er com­pon­ents. This art­icle will only briefly touch on these as­pects be­cause the top­ic of ar­chi­tec­ture it­self de­serves its own, much more de­tailed dis­cus­sion.   

Map­ping near to the data source 

In the vast ma­jor­ity of IoT solu­tions, the task of ap­ply­ing se­mantics to un­struc­tured data or map­ping it to the ad­dress space of an OPC UA serv­er needs to be done as near as pos­sible to the data source and not with­in a cent­ral­ized data cen­ter or cloud. There are many reas­ons for this, one be­ing ap­plic­a­tions that already con­sume data loc­ally at the edge. An­oth­er ex­ample would be the kind of struc­tured ana­lys­is that en­com­passes mul­tiple levels, such as cal­cu­lat­ing OEE scores for in­di­vidu­al ma­chines, a site, or the en­tire group of com­pan­ies. The sheer volume of data pro­duced by devices and auto­ma­tion net­works may also cre­ate its own prob­lem, with the avail­able budget or band­width pre­vent­ing the trans­fer of this data to a cent­ral plat­form in its en­tirety.

Uni­fied namespaces

In the con­text of IoT solu­tions, a “uni­fied namespace” is a design pat­tern for soft­ware solu­tions. With a uni­fied namespace, OT and oth­er data can be provided by stand­ard IT tech­no­lo­gies, which en­sures the ef­fi­cient use of this data by ap­plic­a­tion de­velopers and data sci­ent­ists. In a real-world im­ple­ment­a­tion, this could in­volve (along­side oth­er com­pon­ents) the use of an MQTT broker with JSON en­cod­ing for user data, for ex­ample, which in turn ac­cesses an OPC UA serv­er as its data source. For the pub­lic­a­tion and con­sol­id­a­tion of data with­in a uni­fied namespace, these tasks can be sim­pli­fied and largely auto­mated by util­iz­ing OPC UA serv­ers based on stand­ard in­form­a­tion mod­els.

UA Cloud Lib­rary

Once users have de­cided to de­ploy OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els for their IoT solu­tion, mod­el man­age­ment is the next ques­tion that needs to be ad­dressed. De­veloped jointly by the OPC Found­a­tion and CE­SMII, the UA Cloud Lib­rary is a data­base for OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els and ad­dress spaces [ht­tps://op­cfound­a­tion.org/mar­kets-col­lab­or­a­tion/cloudlib/]. An HT­TP REST in­ter­face is provided to sim­pli­fy the shar­ing, ex­plor­a­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion of in­form­a­tion mod­els, wheth­er manu­ally or with auto­mated tools. Two ac­cess mod­els are provided, one be­ing the glob­al UA Cloud Lib­rary in­stance hos­ted by the OPC Found­a­tion [ht­tps://uacloudlib­rary.op­cfound­a­tion.org/]. Al­tern­at­ively, users who want to op­er­ate their own in­stance can run the UA Cloud Lib­rary as an open-source project [ht­tps://git­hub.com/OP­CFound­a­tion/UA-CloudLib­rary/]. Whichever de­ploy­ment op­tion is chosen, the UA Cloud Lib­rary helps users de­vel­op and scale their IoT solu­tions when fa­cing the chal­lenge of en­sur­ing the ef­fi­cient man­age­ment of OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els and ad­dress spaces.  

Product port­fo­lio 

Launched sev­er­al years ago, the Se­cure In­teg­ra­tion Serv­er (SIS) from Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al is a Win­dows ap­plic­a­tion that ac­quires data from sev­er­al sources via OPC UA and ag­greg­ates this data with­in a single OPC UA serv­er. SIS then per­mits the con­fig­ur­able map­ping of the data sources to match load­able OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els. A second product, the edgeAg­greg­at­or, was then made avail­able, which of­fers a com­par­able range of func­tion­al­ity as a con­tain­er­ized soft­ware mod­ule. 

Re­cently, Soft­ing once again ex­pan­ded its port­fo­lio by adding OPC UA map­ping func­tion­al­ity to its edge­Con­nect­or fam­ily and the edgeG­ate hard­ware product. Along­side OPC UA and MQTT, these products can source data from a wide range of in­dus­tri­al pro­to­cols. Ac­cess is provided to Siemens and Al­len-Brad­ley con­trols, for ex­ample, as well as Siemens Si­n­u­merik or Fa­nuc CNC ma­chines and data sources that “speak” Mod­bus. In all of these products, data source map­ping defin­i­tions can be entered manu­ally via a GUI or sup­plied by an auto­mated sys­tem via HT­TP REST. 

For cus­tom­ers who need to col­lect ma­chine data and con­fig­ure its flex­ible map­ping to OPC UA ad­dress spaces, Soft­ing’s port­fo­lio there­fore en­sures they can pick a product that matches their pre­ferred in­fra­struc­ture and op­er­at­ing mod­el. 

Ref­er­ence project 

A large com­pany from the min­er­als in­dustry launched a broad-based di­git­al­iz­a­tion ini­ti­at­ive with a multi-year times­cale. As part of this project, the com­pany aimed to de­vel­op at least 20 IoT ap­plic­a­tions and roll these out to more than 100 pro­duc­tion sites via a cloud plat­form (AWS). The com­pany had ori­gin­ally planned to trans­fer all the un­struc­tured ma­chine data col­lec­ted to the cloud plat­form but this quickly proved im­prac­tic­al. Abandon­ing the idea, the cus­tom­er real­ized they needed to de­ploy loc­al OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els at ma­chine level to stand­ard­ize the data be­fore it left the edge. In this scen­ario, OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els provide a lay­er of ab­strac­tion between OT and IT, en­sur­ing that all of the sites “look the same” to IoT ap­plic­a­tion de­velopers and data sci­ent­ists alike. Know­ing that the in­form­a­tion mod­els de­ployed would change dur­ing the solu­tion life­time, the cus­tom­er needed a set of tools that would guar­an­tee ef­fi­cient, cent­ral­ized man­age­ment. This is provided by the UA Cloud Lib­rary, which the cus­tom­er runs them­selves on the AWS plat­form. 

Sum­mary 

The use of OPC UA in­form­a­tion mod­els de­liv­ers sig­ni­fic­ant be­ne­fits to device man­u­fac­tur­ers, ap­plic­a­tion en­gin­eers and cus­tom­ers alike. Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al of­fers a com­pre­hens­ive port­fo­lio of con­nectiv­ity products that util­ize a range of in­dus­tri­al pro­to­cols to col­lect device data at the edge and make this data avail­able to cli­ent ap­plic­a­tions via user-con­fig­ur­able OPC UA serv­ers. Soft­ing’s ap­proach here ex­pands the func­tion­al­ity of the crit­ic­al com­pon­ent of ma­chine con­nectiv­ity, and es­tab­lishes a found­a­tion for the flex­ible and ef­fi­cient con­struc­tion of in­dus­tri­al data spaces in in­nov­at­ive IoT solu­tions. 
 

In in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion, ef­fi­ciency and safety must go hand in hand: People, ma­chines and pro­cesses must be re­li­ably pro­tec­ted without im­pair­ing pro­duc­tion pro­cesses. However, space is lim­ited in nar­row pro­duc­tion lines, on auto­mated guided vehicles and ro­bots. This is where the new ul­tra-com­pact RSL 200 safety laser scan­ner from Leuze scores points: With its com­pact di­men­sions, it can be in­teg­rated ef­fort­lessly and used flex­ibly to safe­guard danger zones and ac­cess points. 

Safety laser scan­ners are in­creas­ingly in the lime­light in al­most every in­dustry. This is be­cause the ver­sat­ile devices are in­dis­pens­able in many cases to en­sure the highest safety stand­ards for the pro­tec­tion of people. Thanks to con­fig­ur­able pro­tect­ive and warn­ing fields, they can be used very flex­ibly for danger zone and ac­cess guard­ing - for both sta­tion­ary and mo­bile ap­plic­a­tions. A typ­ic­al area of ap­plic­a­tion is pro­tect­ing a ma­chine´s dan­ger­ous work­ing ranges against ac­cess and the pres­ence of per­sons. Laser safety scan­ners are also ideal for safe­guard­ing autonom­ous mo­bile ro­bots (AM­Rs) and driver­less trans­port sys­tems, also known as auto­mated guided vehicles (AGVs). 

Max­im­um safety in the smal­lest space 

Mod­ern safety laser scan­ners have to meet a wide range of re­quire­ments at once: Be­sides their main task of safely shut­ting down ma­chines or sys­tems, they must not im­pair ma­chine avail­ab­il­ity or lead to un­ne­ces­sary down­times. In ad­di­tion, laser scan­ners are ex­pec­ted to have an im­press­ive op­er­at­ing range and scan­ning angle, while the sys­tem op­er­at­or takes safety clas­si­fic­a­tions in ac­cord­ance with Type 3, SIL 2 and PLd as giv­en. The sys­tem op­er­at­or must also be able to rely on con­veni­ent con­fig­ur­a­tion and dia­gnostics, which can be car­ried out ef­fort­lessly and in­tu­it­ively via vari­ous in­ter­faces such as Bluetooth, USB or Eth­er­net TCP/IP. Last but not least, mod­ern safety laser scan­ners are se­lec­ted based on their device size. That´s be­cause in­creas­ing auto­ma­tion is mak­ing spa­tial ef­fi­ciency ever more im­port­ant in many pro­duc­tion en­vir­on­ments. Sys­tems are be­com­ing more com­plex, while the space avail­able for safety tech­no­logy is shrink­ing. There is of­ten little room for this, es­pe­cially in mo­bile use on AGVs. 

The ul­tra-com­pact RSL 200 safety laser scan­ner com­bines state-of-the-art LiD­ar tech­no­logy in a min­im­al space of just 80 x 80 x 86 mil­li­meters. This makes it easy to in­teg­rate even in ex­tremely con­fined spaces, wheth­er in sta­tion­ary or mo­bile ap­plic­a­tions. 

Simple in­stall­a­tion 

The com­pact safety scan­ner from Leuze gives the user more op­tions for simple and more flex­ible in­stall­a­tion, es­pe­cially in con­fined en­vir­on­ments, thanks to its space-sav­ing mount­ing brack­et or con­nec­tion tech­no­logy. The right mount­ing ac­cessor­ies are key to quick in­teg­ra­tion: Leuze has de­veloped its own in­nov­at­ive mount­ing brack­et for the RSL 200 to provide ef­fort­less fasten­ing and al­low the safety laser scan­ner´s scan level to be aligned ho­ri­zont­ally and ver­tic­ally. Simple ser­vi­cing is also en­sured: The RSL 200 can be re­placed quickly and eas­ily with just four screws, and the sensor para­met­ers can be trans­ferred from the old to the new sensor via a memory card without any sensor know­ledge re­quired.

Ro­tat­able M12 con­nec­tions on the RSL 200 laser scan­ner al­low ex­tremely flex­ible cable rout­ing for I/Os, power sup­ply and data trans­mis­sion. These are es­sen­tial cri­ter­ia, par­tic­u­larly for use on small AGVs. Leuze also of­fers a new mo­bile dia­gnostics app that al­lows status in­form­a­tion to be con­veni­ently re­trieved even if the laser scan­ner is in­stalled in loc­a­tions that are dif­fi­cult or im­possible to ac­cess.

Aligned to your every re­quire­ment 

For a safety laser scan­ner to work op­tim­ally, its ´in­ner´ val­ues are also im­port­ant. For ex­ample, the scan­ning angle must be large enough to re­li­ably ful­fill the ap­plic­a­tion-spe­cif­ic safety task, e.g., to com­pletely cov­er blind spots or hard-to-see zones be­hind ma­chines or con­vey­or belts. It must also be able to safe­guard small om­ni­direc­tion­al AGVs/AM­Rs in every dir­ec­tion - for ex­ample, the RSL 200 from Leuze of­fers a 275-de­gree scan­ning angle at an op­er­at­ing range of three meters. The large scan­ning angle al­lows the user to en­sure all-round pro­tec­tion with just two di­ag­on­ally po­si­tioned devices, even tak­ing mount­ing tol­er­ances in­to ac­count.

32 switch­able sets of pro­tect­ive and warn­ing fields en­able the AGV/AMR user to con­tinu­ously ad­just the speed and dir­ec­tion of travel. The mon­itored areas can thus be op­tim­ally ad­ap­ted to curved paths, dif­fer­ent speeds and vari­ous load con­di­tions. 
 

The new IO-Link device I/O boxes from Phoenix Contact add robust devices to the portfolio for the Axioline E product family. They offer digital signal processing and flexible connection options for demanding environments.

The two new IO-Link device I/O boxes (AXL E IOL DIO8 M12 3M and AXL E IOL DI8 M12 3M) extend the new generation Axioline E series for control-cabinet-free automation to include devices for digital signal processing. Featuring increased IP65/IP67/IP69 degree of protection and a fully encapsulated zinc die-cast housing in a narrow overall width of just 30 mm, the devices are designed for direct use in a machine under harsh ambient conditions. Both devices enable flexible field wiring with proven M12 screw connectors or the new M12 push-pull fast-connection technology.
 

AGCO Fendt pro­duces the sheet met­al parts for its tract­ors and ag­ri­cul­tur­al ma­chines on a laser blank­ing sys­tem that cuts the ma­ter­i­al from a con­tinu­ous coil with pre­ci­sion and high ef­fi­ciency. The met­al waste pro­duced in each step has to be re­li­ably and safely dis­posed of without in­ter­rupt­ing the pro­duc­tion flow – five days a week, around the clock.

“The aim was to cre­ate an in­tel­li­gent sys­tem that seam­lessly in­teg­rates in­to our ex­ist­ing pro­cesses,” ex­plains Flori­an Ham­mel, Project Man­ager Stra­tegic Plant and Tech­no­logy De­vel­op­ment at AGCO Fendt. “We wanted to in­crease pro­ductiv­ity and min­im­ize down­time while mak­ing more ef­fi­cient use of our re­sources.”

In­tel­li­gent waste man­age­ment with smart de­tails

KA­BELSCHLEPP, a re­li­able part­ner of AGCO Fendt for many years, had the right an­swer. The spe­cial­ists for con­vey­or and guide­way pro­tec­tion sys­tems (CAPS) de­signed a fully auto­mated solu­tion for the laser blank­ing sys­tem that in­de­pend­ently and re­li­ably trans­ports the sheet met­al cutoffs from the pro­duc­tion work­shop to an ad­ja­cent con­tain­er build­ing, where it dis­poses of them in two skips with fill level op­tim­iz­a­tion.

“The con­vey­or belt with its own con­trol sys­tem and the in­di­vidu­al skips, which en­sure op­tim­um trans­port with­in and out­side of the com­pany, are cent­ral ele­ments of the re­cyc­ling pro­cess,” ex­plains Jörg Ku­bina, Project En­gin­eer Sales at KA­BELSCHLEPP. “This en­ables us to in­crease the value of the scrap, mean­ing that the in­vest­ment pays off.”

The in­ter­face com­mu­nic­a­tion with the laser cut­ting sys­tem ad­di­tion­ally sup­plies Fendt with all the re­quired in­form­a­tion for its pro­cess data man­age­ment. Last but not least, the cus­tom­er be­ne­fits from com­pre­hens­ive project sup­port, in­clud­ing a safety concept, con­trol sys­tem, in­stall­a­tion, and com­mis­sion­ing, as well as from the ser­vice avail­ab­il­ity over the en­tire ser­vice life of the sys­tem.

(Cent­ral) dis­pos­al of waste ma­ter­i­als

Re­du­cing re­source con­sump­tion is be­com­ing ever more im­port­ant. Met­al scrap is a valu­able raw ma­ter­i­al in the re­cyc­ling in­dustry. The con­vey­or sys­tems sup­plied by KA­BELSCHLEPP for the (cent­ral) dis­pos­al of waste ma­ter­i­als at the fact­ory and for sep­ar­at­ing dif­fer­ent ma­ter­i­als help to in­crease the value of the scrap.

Sus­tain­ab­il­ity needs ser­vice

The most sus­tain­able product is the one the lasts the longest. Ac­cord­ingly, ser­vice and cus­tom­er care at TSUBAKI KA­BELSCHLEPP go far bey­ond just the selling of products. The glob­al ProService ini­ti­at­ive of the TSUBAKI Group rep­res­ents a sus­tain­able, world­wide stand­ard­ized ser­vice strategy that com­prises six mod­ules – in­stall­a­tion sup­port, main­ten­ance train­ing, on-site in­spec­tion, ana­lys­is, per­form­ance mon­it­or­ing, and op­tim­iz­a­tion – and en­sures con­sist­ent qual­ity stand­ards. Users be­ne­fit from glob­al flex­ib­il­ity and cus­tom­ized ser­vice sup­port by the KA­BELSCHLEPP product ex­perts while also re­ceiv­ing en­gin­eer­ing, product, ser­vice from a single source and a sys­tem war­ranty
 

TME's product range has been ex­pan­ded to in­clude Power­Lok™ power con­nect­ors from Amphen­ol GEC. This is a new of­fer­ing primar­ily aimes at man­u­fac­tur­ers and elec­tric­al en­gin­eers fo­cused on EV and hy­brid auto­mot­ive in­dus­tries. Ad­di­tion­ally, the presen­ted products are also suit­able for re­new­able en­ergy in­stall­a­tions, es­pe­cially en­ergy stor­age sys­tems.

Al­though all in­tro­duced products be­long to the same fam­ily, this of­fer­ing should be di­vided in­to two groups: Power­Lok™ G2 plugs and sock­ets, and Power­Lok™ 4.0 G2 con­nect­ors.

The Power­Lok™ G2 products are high-per­form­ance elec­tric­al con­nect­ors made us­ing alu­min­um al­loy. They can con­duct cur­rents up to 300A at a nom­in­al voltage of 1kV DC. They of­fer a wide range of con­fig­ur­a­tions, in­clud­ing straight and angled ver­sions. The as­sort­ment in­cludes both wire-moun­ted plugs (cross-sec­tions up to 150mm²) and pan­el-moun­ted plugs. A single con­nect­or can have 1, 2, or 3 pins. At the same time, the body design en­sures com­plete in­su­la­tion and shield­ing of con­tacts to pro­tect op­er­at­ors and min­im­ize in­ter­fer­ence.

The main ap­plic­a­tions of these products are power trains in hy­brid and fully elec­tri­fied vehicles:  pas­sen­ger cars, trucks, buses, as well as ag­ri­cul­tur­al ma­chinery and off-road vehicles. Giv­en such de­mand­ing ap­plic­a­tions, the products are made to a pro­tec­tion class reach­ing IP67, i.e., high wa­ter res­ist­ance and full dust tight­ness that could im­pair the con­duct­iv­ity of con­nec­tions. Com­plete wa­ter res­ist­ance is achieved when the con­nect­ors are mated.

Un­like the con­nect­ors de­scribed above, the Power­Lok™ 4.0 G2 sub-series is in­ten­ded for power­ing ac­cessor­ies and com­pon­ents in vehicles (sensors, ac­tu­at­ors, ser­vomech­an­isms, etc.). Their elec­tric­al para­met­ers are there­fore slightly lower (cur­rents 5…60A, wires up to 10mm²), but their bod­ies are also smal­ler in size. Here too, high pro­tec­tion class reach­ing IP69 after con­nec­tion is en­sured. It is worth not­ing that all Power­Lok™ con­nect­ors also fea­ture wide thermal tol­er­ance and can op­er­ate in tem­per­at­ures ran­ging from -40°C to 125°C.
 

With the MSS-IO, SCHURTER is en­ter­ing the field of bi­d­irec­tion­al com­mu­nic­a­tion via switches in in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion. The MSS-IO is based on the suc­cess­ful SCHURTER MSS elec­tron­ic switch, which has been ex­pan­ded to in­clude an IO-Link mod­ule.

The MSS-IO switch is based on wear-free res­ist­ance meas­ure­ment and com­pletely avoids mech­an­ic­al com­pon­ents. In­stead of ca­pa­cit­ive tech­no­logy, a pre­cise change in elec­tric­al res­ist­ance is used for switch de­tec­tion: sens­it­ive enough to de­tect the smal­lest changes in pres­sure, ro­bust enough for in­dus­tri­al series pro­cesses. 

Easy to Clean

Thanks to the closed sur­face, the switch is in­sens­it­ive to wa­ter, dirt and clean­ing sub­stances. This is a clear ad­vant­age in hy­gien­ic­ally sens­it­ive areas such as food pro­cessing or labor­at­ory auto­ma­tion. The ab­sence of mov­ing parts min­im­izes the main­ten­ance ef­fort and in­creases the ser­vice life enorm­ously.

IO-Link In­ter­face

The IO-Link in­ter­face al­lows bi­d­irec­tion­al com­mu­nic­a­tion, para­met­er­iz­a­tion dur­ing op­er­a­tion and real-time dia­gnostics. The con­nec­tion is made via stand­ard M12 con­nect­ors. Pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance and simple in­teg­ra­tion in­to ex­ist­ing In­dustry 4.0 en­vir­on­ments are guar­an­teed. Typ­ic­al fields of ap­plic­a­tion are auto­ma­tion tech­no­logy, ro­bot­ics and hy­giene-crit­ic­al ap­plic­a­tions. The MSS IO-Link switch is par­tic­u­larly suit­able for scen­ari­os with high de­mands on pre­ci­sion, pro­cess re­li­ab­il­ity and di­git­al com­mu­nic­a­tion.
 

The Traco TMR 10WIR series is a fam­ily of rug­ged­ized 10 Watt DC/DC con­vert­ers for highest re­li­ab­il­ity in harsh en­vir­on­ments. The con­vert­ers come in a SIP-8 met­al pack­age and have a wide 4:1 in­put range, in­creased res­ist­ance against elec­tro­mag­net­ic in­ter­fer­ence, shock/vi­bra­tion and thermal shock. 

Wide tem­per­at­ure range without de­rat­ing

The in­nov­at­ive design provides high ef­fi­cien­cies up to 89% and thus en­able an op­er­at­ing tem­per­at­ure range from -40 up to +75°C without de­rat­ing. The ap­provals ac­cord­ing to stand­ards EN 50155 and EN 61373 qual­i­fy them for rail­way and trans­port­a­tion sys­tems. Ad­di­tion­al qual­i­fic­a­tion for the fire be­ha­viour of com­pon­ents ac­cord­ing to EN 45545-2 and the safety ap­prov­al ac­cord­ing to IEC/- EN62368-1, UL62368-1 sup­port a po­ten­tial com­pli­ance test of the ap­plic­a­tion. Built-in fea­tures like in­put un­der-voltage-lock­out, short cir­cuit pro­tec­tion and re­mote On/Off make this series suit­able for al­most any ap­plic­a­tion de­mands and thus fa­cil­it­ate the design-in pro­cess.
 

OM­RON Elec­tron­ic has in­tro­duced the E8Y-L series of com­pact pres­sure dis­plays that com­bine easy in­stall­a­tion with flex­ible fea­tures suited to a vari­ety of in­dus­tri­al pro­cess con­trol and equip­ment mon­it­or­ing ap­plic­a­tions. The 31mm × 30mm × 30mm units dis­play sensed pres­sure on a 3-di­git, 7-seg­ment LED pan­el as well as open-col­lect­or 2-out­put con­nec­tions.  Some types have a stand­ard in­dus­tri­al 4-20mA ana­log out­put. Four op­tions al­low de­sign­ers to se­lect the pres­sure-meas­ure­ment range, from 0-200Pa, 0-500Pa, 0-2kPa and 0-5kPa. There is also a choice of 4.5mm barb pres­sure port con­nec­tion or a 1/8” BSPT die-cast threaded con­nect­or for stand­ard pipe fit­tings, avail­able with the two high-pres­sure vari­ants. 

Set­ting of in­di­vidu­al lim­it 

The flex­ible op­tions let these sensors mon­it­or pres­sure in di­verse scen­ari­os and dif­fer­ent zones, such as main­tain­ing the reg­u­lated pres­sure in a clean room, and auto­mat­ic­ally reg­u­lat­ing ducts or valves. Among typ­ic­al ap­plic­a­tions, the E8Y-L sensors are used in semi­con­duct­or wafer-pro­cessing re­act­ors, to mon­it­or or­gan­ic gas-flow paths dur­ing im­plant­a­tion and in safety sys­tems such as purge-gas leak­age de­tec­tion. Users can eas­ily set thresholds for up­per and lower lim­its of meas­ure­ment pres­sure, which can sim­pli­fy de­tect­ing ma­chinery faults such as clogged ex­haust or blocked vents. 

Spe­cial fea­tures of the new OM­RON E8Y-L sensors in­clude zero-point ad­just­ment that lets users set the zero point to any value and sim­pli­fy track­ing pres­sure changes. In ad­di­tion, auto­mat­ic teach­ing lets the user set the pres­sure at which the sensor turns on or off. Users in­ter­act via four simple but­tons on the front pan­el to se­lect the meas­ure­ment range, dis­played chan­nel, and op­er­at­ing mode. 

Vari­ants for a wide range of en­vir­on­ments

The sensors can op­er­ate from -10°C to 55°C with no con­dens­a­tion or icing, and with up to 85% re­l­at­ive hu­mid­ity, al­low­ing use in a wide vari­ety of in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ments. With a wide sup­ply-voltage range from 12V to 24V, and con­sum­ing up to 50mA or 75mA, the sensors are ready to op­er­ate from pop­u­lar in­dus­tri­al power rails. In total, the new E8Y-L product line con­tains 13 mem­bers in­clud­ing all op­tions for meas­ure­ment range, out­put con­nec­tion, and pres­sure port. 
 

Re­pla­cing tra­di­tion­al in­duc­tion mo­tors, Elec­tron­ic­ally Com­mut­ated (EC) mo­tors set stand­ards in en­ergy sav­ings and per­form­ance with their in­teg­rated drives and per­man­ent mag­net mo­tor struc­tures. EC mo­tors by De­veloped by WAT Mo­tor have an IE5+ ef­fi­ciency level, ad­vanced com­mu­nic­a­tion cap­ab­il­it­ies, and field-ori­ented vec­tor con­trol meth­od. 

High ef­fi­ciency and low en­ergy con­sump­tion

The WAT EC mo­tors with per­man­ent mag­net syn­chron­ous mo­tor (PMSM) tech­no­logy and in­teg­rated drives of­fer sig­ni­fic­antly high en­ergy ef­fi­ciency and meet the IE5+ en­ergy ef­fi­ciency stand­ard, achiev­ing an ef­fi­ciency level above 95%, while con­ven­tion­al asyn­chron­ous mo­tors typ­ic­ally reach only IE3 ef­fi­ciency levels. 

Pre­cise and Quiet Op­er­a­tion 

WAT EC mo­tors util­ize a field-ori­ented vec­tor con­trol meth­od. This con­trol al­gorithm op­tim­izes the mo­tor’s mag­net­ic field, max­im­iz­ing torque while min­im­iz­ing en­ergy loss. As a res­ult, the mo­tors are not only more ef­fi­cient but also op­er­ate with sig­ni­fic­antly re­duced noise levels. In in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions, low noise levels are cru­cial, par­tic­u­larly in vent­il­a­tion sys­tems and house­hold ap­pli­ances. Tra­di­tion­al mo­tors can gen­er­ate noise due to mech­an­ic­al losses and in­duced cur­rents, where­as EC mo­tors re­duce vi­bra­tions and mech­an­ic­al res­on­ance through dir­ect di­git­al con­trol.

Real-time mon­it­or­ing and re­mote con­trol with Mod­bus

WAT EC mo­tors are equipped with the widely used Mod­bus com­mu­nic­a­tion pro­tocol, en­abling real-time mon­it­or­ing and con­trol of para­met­ers such as speed, torque, voltage, and cur­rent. This cap­ab­il­ity al­lows seam­less in­teg­ra­tion in­to cent­ral­ized auto­ma­tion sys­tems, en­han­cing ef­fi­ciency in in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions. The Mod­bus com­mu­nic­a­tion fea­ture also en­ables real-time fault de­tec­tion. Con­di­tions such as over­heat­ing, over­cur­rent, or un­der­voltage can be in­stantly de­tec­ted, trig­ger­ing alerts for op­er­at­ors to en­sure sys­tem safety and con­tinu­ity.

High Re­li­ab­il­ity and Dur­ab­il­ity

WAT EC mo­tors fea­ture a com­pact struc­ture built from long-last­ing and dur­able com­pon­ents. Com­pared to tra­di­tion­al in­duc­tion mo­tors, they ex­per­i­ence less wear and mech­an­ic­al loss, min­im­iz­ing main­ten­ance re­quire­ments. With a brush­less design, EC mo­tors are sig­ni­fic­antly more res­ist­ant to mech­an­ic­al fail­ures and can op­er­ate for ex­ten­ded peri­ods without in­ter­rup­tions.

WAT EC mo­tors are suit­able for a wide range of ap­plic­a­tions like HVAC, pump­ing or auto­ma­tion sys­tems. They are avail­able in a power range from A to Z kW and typ­ic­ally used in tem­per­at­ure ranges from …..
 

The Nex­en Group of­fers an ex­tens­ive line of Nex­Safe rod locks, ser­vo­mo­tor brakes and rail brakes that are Safety Cer­ti­fied to the in­ter­na­tion­al safety stand­ard ISO 13849-1. The cer­ti­fied rod locks, ser­vo­mo­tor brakes and rail brakes provide ma­chine build­ers with a veri­fied solu­tion for designs when safety-cer­ti­fied products are re­quired. With the cer­ti­fic­a­tion from In­ter­tek, Nex­Safe products can be used on ma­chines for op­er­a­tions such as hold­ing, emer­gency stop­ping, or po­s­i­tion­ing. 

Op­er­at­ing mode sensor op­tion

Nex­Safe spring-en­gaged, air-re­lease brakes are de­signed for ap­plic­a­tions that re­quire low to zero back­lash. Op­tion­al op­er­at­ing mode sensors (en­gage­ment and dis­en­gage­ment) fur­ther en­sure Nex­Safe products are an ideal fit for safety chan­nels de­signed for ISO 13849-1 Cat­egor­ies B through 4 and Per­form­ance Levels PLa through PLe.  

ISO 13849-1 is a safety of ma­chinery stand­ard that as­sists in the design and in­teg­ra­tion of safety-re­lated parts of con­trol sys­tems or ma­chines. This safety stand­ard in­cludes a sys­tem of cat­egor­iz­ing the risk a ma­chine poses and the safety func­tions to mit­ig­ate that risk. By us­ing Nex­Safe brakes in the re­com­men­ded con­fig­ur­a­tion, end-users can achieve the safety stand­ard they re­quire.
 

Na­n­otec in­tro­duces the N6, a com­pact and power­ful con­trol­ler/drive for step­per mo­tors (NEMA 14 to 34) and BLDC mo­tors up to NEMA 23. With field-ori­ented con­trol (FOC), the N6 en­sures smooth op­er­a­tion and high en­ergy ef­fi­ciency. The sensor­less closed-loop con­trol provides pre­cise man­age­ment of torque and speed. 

For ap­plic­a­tions up to 300 W

The con­trol­ler/drive sup­ports Hall sensors, in­cre­ment­al en­coders (QEI), and SSI en­coders. An ex­tern­al brak­ing res­ist­or can also be con­nec­ted. Rated at 6 A con­tinu­ous and up to 18 A peak, the N6 is ideal for ap­plic­a­tions up to 300 W. It fea­tures six di­git­al and two ana­log in­puts, three feed­back chan­nels, and a brake out­put, mak­ing it easy to in­teg­rate in­to com­plex sys­tems. The N6 can be pro­grammed and para­met­er­ized with Na­n­otec’s free soft­ware Plug&Drive Stu­dio, and sup­ports Eth­er­CAT, CAN­open, Eth­er­net/IP, Mod­bus TCP, and Mod­bus RTU.

The con­trol­ler/drive is de­signed for de­mand­ing ap­plic­a­tions in labor­at­ory auto­ma­tion, med­ic­al tech­no­logy, pack­aging equip­ment, SMD as­sembly, and wind­ing sys­tems. STO (Safe Torque Off) func­tion­al­ity will be avail­able soon.
 

Portes­cap is ex­cited to in­tro­duce its latest in­nov­a­tion for the in­dus­tri­al power tools mar­ket: the 40EC-Pro Power­Tool (PT) brush­less slot­less mo­tor. This mo­tor comes in two lengths, the 40EC-Pro PT 44 at 44mm and the 40EC-Pro PT 55 at 55mm. Not­ably, the 40EC-Pro PT 55 is Portes­cap’s first mo­tor to fea­ture an in­teg­rated fan, which act­ively cools the mo­tor and boosts its con­tinu­ous power from 150W to 425W. Both mod­els are cost-op­tim­ized through an in­nov­at­ive as­sembly pro­cess, en­sur­ing premi­um per­form­ance at an af­ford­able price.

With its slot­less design, the 40EC-Pro PT achieves speeds up to 30,000 rpm, en­sur­ing high per­form­ance even at low voltage. The ad­vanced elec­tro­mag­net­ic design al­lows it to sus­tain a peak torque of up to 1.1 Nm for 2 seconds. Weigh­ing just 230 grams and hav­ing a com­pact 40mm dia­met­er, it not only sup­ports ap­plic­a­tion mini­atur­iz­a­tion but also en­hances tool er­go­nom­ics.

High­er torque at lower speed

Com­pat­ible with R32 and R40 gear­heads and the M-Sense en­coder, the 4-pole BLDC mo­tor of­fers high­er torque at lower speeds and more ac­cur­ate po­s­i­tion­ing. Portes­cap also provides cus­tom­iz­a­tion of the mo­tor’s elec­tric­al para­met­ers and mech­an­ic­al in­ter­face to meet spe­cif­ic ap­plic­a­tion re­quire­ments.

Bat­tery-powered hand tools, es­pe­cially those us­ing 18V bat­ter­ies, be­ne­fit im­mensely from the 40EC-Pro PT mo­tor. This in­cludes nut run­ners, tight­en­ing tools, and strap­ping, stap­ling, riv­et­ing, crimp­ing, and cut­ting hand tools. The 40EC-Pro PT mo­tor fa­cil­it­ates the trans­ition from manu­al to powered devices and sup­ports the shift from brushed to brush­less tech­no­lo­gies.
 

Bosch Rexroth is expanding its CKR series of compact linear motion modules with an innovative dual belt axis, offering dynamic handling and a total load capacity of up to 770 kg. The new CKR-280 heavy-duty axis integrates the functionality of two linear axes into a single system. Its two independently driven carriages in a single frame enable dynamic applications with high drive torques and short cycle times.

Two drive chains, one axis

This is ideal for applications in battery production, intralogistics and machine tool automation. Many industries are increasingly seeking compact handling solutions that can move large payloads with high dynamics. With the CKR compact modules in size 280, Bosch Rexroth offers a heavy-duty axis that optimises space and can handle two payloads of up to 385 kg each, as well as drive torques of up to 250 Nm. The two carriages can move independently within the sturdy aluminium frame of the compact module. Thanks to the two integrated drive chains, a variety of tasks can now be performed using just one linear axis instead of two. This saves time, costs and installation space.

The compact modules can be configured online in lengths of up to 5.50 metres to enable fast and easy engineering. Bosch Rexroth can also deliver longer travel ranges on request. High accelerations of up to 5 g and a maximum speed of 5 m/s provide optimal conditions for achieving short cycle times with high precision and repeatability of ±0.05 mm. A wide variety of travel profiles can be implemented independently depending on the customer’s requirements.
 

Today, mod­ern meas­ure­ment tech­no­lo­gies en­able high-pre­ci­sion de­tec­tion of the move­ment of li­quids and gases - and thus provide valu­able data for nu­mer­ous ap­plic­a­tions. How does the air flow around an aero­plane? How does the blood move through our veins? And how can pol­lut­ant emis­sions in com­bus­tion pro­cesses be min­im­ised? For this pur­pose, speed, dir­ec­tion, pres­sure and tur­bu­lence with­in a flow are ana­lysed in or­der to in­crease ef­fi­ciency, en­sure safety and drive in­nov­a­tion in a wide vari­ety of areas.

A range of meth­ods are avail­able to meas­ure these flows, in­clud­ing visu­al ones such as particle im­age ve­loci­metry (PIV). High-res­ol­u­tion cam­er­as are used to track marked particles with­in a flow and ana­lyse their move­ment. iLA_5150 GmbH from Aachen (Ger­many) now also re­lies on EBIV. The ab­bre­vi­ation stands for Event Based Particle Im­age Ve­loci­metry and is a new op­tic­al meth­od for the qual­it­at­ive and quant­it­at­ive visu­al­isa­tion of flows and flow ve­lo­cit­ies. It com­bines PIV with event-based cam­er­as, here with a uEye EVS from IDS Ima­ging De­vel­op­ment Sys­tems GmbH. The in­nov­at­ive sensor tech­no­logy of the in­dus­tri­al cam­era en­ables highly dy­nam­ic and en­ergy-ef­fi­cient de­tec­tion, es­pe­cially of fast and tur­bu­lent move­ments.

Ap­plic­a­tion

In the EBIV meth­od, tiny particles are ad­ded to a flow­ing flu­id and il­lu­min­ated in a plane, the so-called light sec­tion plane. They gen­er­ate in­di­vidu­al light pulses as they enter and exit the LED light sec­tion. This change in loc­al bright­ness is re­cor­ded in­de­pend­ently by the cam­era pixels and trans­mit­ted to the PC as a data stream of "change events". In con­trast to con­ven­tion­al cam­er­as, event-based mod­els there­fore only re­act to the changes in bright­ness re­gistered in the im­age field. Sta­tion­ary scattered light, such as back­ground or a non-chan­ging il­lu­min­ated sur­face, does not gen­er­ate a meas­ure­ment sig­nal. This re­duces the amount of data con­sid­er­ably.

Frame rates of up to 10,000 frames per second

The data stream es­sen­tially con­tains in­form­a­tion about what hap­pens, when and where. In de­tail, these are the pixel co­ordin­ates on the sensor, mi­cro­second time stamps of the pixel events and the in­form­a­tion about the events: ON or OFF. This al­lows a dis­tinc­tion to be made between in­creas­ing in­tens­ity (ON event) and de­creas­ing in­tens­ity (OFF event). Us­ing suit­able soft­ware, the stream can be con­ver­ted in­to an im­age mat­rix in which both the spa­tial in­form­a­tion and the lin­ear time base of the stream are avail­able. The res­ult is com­par­able to the ex­tremely high frame rate of a high-speed cam­era.

"The EBIV meas­ure­ment meth­od dif­fers fun­da­ment­ally from con­ven­tion­al ima­ging meth­ods. They usu­ally gen­er­ate very large amounts of data and re­quire power­ful peri­pher­als that can pro­cess them. For ex­cep­tion­al frame rates of 1000 Hertz and more, the im­age-based cam­er­as re­quired are them­selves very com­plex and ex­pens­ive. With the help of event-based cam­era tech­no­logy, com­par­able frame rates of 10,000 frames per second are pos­sible, whereby only stand­ard PC in­ter­faces such as USB with a few gig­abits per second are re­quired. The price of the event-based mod­els them­selves is sig­ni­fic­antly lower than that of cor­res­pond­ing high-speed cam­er­as and is there­fore also very in­ter­est­ing for smal­ler teach­ing and re­search in­sti­tu­tions," ex­plains Dr André Brunn, Head of De­vel­op­ment at iLA_5150 GmbH.

Fur­ther pro­cessing

The data stream is con­ver­ted in­to im­age data and dis­played in a front end - the so-called EBIV view­er - for dir­ect on­line flow visu­al­isa­tion. The user can also se­lect the in­teg­ra­tion time, which cor­res­ponds to the ex­pos­ure time of an im­age cam­era, as well as the time in­cre­ments of the se­quence, i.e. the peri­od between two con­sec­ut­ive shots. Clas­sic im­age fil­ters can also be used. With the help of these set­tings, the user can op­tim­ise the dis­play of the move­ment paths and ad­apt them to in­di­vidu­al ex­am­in­a­tion ob­ject­ives. Both fine flow de­tails and large-scale pat­terns can be made more clearly re­cog­nis­able. This abil­ity to re­ad­just the meas­ure­ment res­ults is an­oth­er ad­vant­age of the event-based ap­proach.

In the qual­it­at­ive visu­al­isa­tion of the flow in the EBIV-View, particles are con­tinu­ously il­lu­min­ated so that they are vis­ible as lu­min­ous traces. The meth­od is there­fore very well suited to visu­al­ising the flow. However, it does not provide ex­act meas­ure­ments of its speed or dir­ec­tion. For a pre­cise, nu­mer­ic­al ana­lys­is of the flow prop­er­ties, in­di­vidu­al particles are il­lu­min­ated for a mo­ment us­ing short, time-defined light pulses. 
 

Cam­era and soft­ware

On the cam­era side, iLA re­lies on a uEye XCP-E from IDS. The small, light­weight in­dus­tri­al cam­era of­fers event-based sensor tech­no­logy in a ro­bust die-cast zinc hous­ing (29×29×17 mm) with screw-on USB Mi­cro-B con­nec­tion. It is com­pat­ible with all stand­ard C-mount lens sizes. This makes it ideal for both in­dus­tri­al and non-in­dus­tri­al areas. The in­teg­rated event-based vis­ion sensor (EVS) was de­veloped by Sony and Proph­e­see. It is sup­por­ted by the Meta­v­i­sion SDK, a seam­lessly in­teg­rated suite of soft­ware tools and mod­els, APIs and oth­er train­ing and de­vel­op­ment re­sources from Proph­e­see for ef­fi­cient ana­lys­is, visu­al­isa­tion and cus­tom­isa­tion.

Build­ing on this, the EBIV view­er from iLA_5150/PIVTec is spe­cially tailored to flow visu­al­isa­tion ap­plic­a­tions.

Out­look

The op­tim­isa­tion of flu­id­ic sys­tems and pro­cesses re­quires de­tailed know­ledge of the flow con­di­tions. A qual­it­at­ive flow visu­al­isa­tion is of­ten suf­fi­cient to un­der­stand ef­fects and de­vel­op suit­able con­trol mech­an­isms. Un­til now, however, ima­ging fast flows with high tem­por­al res­ol­u­tion was usu­ally only pos­sible with ex­pens­ive high-speed cam­er­as. Event-based cam­era tech­no­logy of­fers a cost-ef­fect­ive al­tern­at­ive that re­quires sig­ni­fic­antly less tech­nic­al ef­fort. These “simple” meth­ods have been lack­ing in teach­ing and re­search in par­tic­u­lar. Thanks to the ex­treme data re­duc­tion, this tech­no­logy also al­lows the use of sev­er­al cam­er­as or large cam­era ar­rays without the peri­phery be­com­ing a lim­it­a­tion for data trans­fer. The com­pact design of the uEye EVS mod­els also makes them ideal for mo­bile ap­plic­a­tions. This means that real ap­plic­a­tion en­vir­on­ments can be ana­lysed dir­ectly for the first time - without hav­ing to rely on ar­ti­fi­cial flow mod­els or chan­nels.

In short: Event-based cam­er­as en­able ef­fi­cient, cost-ef­fect­ive and high-res­ol­u­tion visu­al­isa­tion and quan­ti­fic­a­tion of flows. Due to the small amounts of data gen­er­ated, many pro­cesses can be ana­lysed al­most in real time, which also makes them in­ter­est­ing for use in fully auto­mated sys­tems. Es­tab­lished flow meas­ure­ment meth­ods such as Particle Im­age Ve­loci­metry (PIV) can be seam­lessly in­teg­rated and ex­pan­ded. The tech­no­logy can be used wherever flow in­form­a­tion is cap­tured by changes in scattered light in­tens­ity - be it from mov­ing particles or vi­brat­ing sur­faces.
 

The abil­ity of SWIR spec­tro­scopy to identi­fy and dis­tin­guish vari­ous types of plastics in­clud­ing low- and high-dens­ity poly­ethyl­ene, polypro­pyl­ene, PT­FE, poly­styrene and PVC found in auto­mot­ive, elec­tron­ic and house­hold product waste is well known. However not all SWIR lenses of­fer the per­form­ance to match the high­er res­ol­u­tion In­di­um Gal­li­um Ar­sen­ide (In­GaAs) de­tect­ors used for this ap­plic­a­tion.

Rob Watkin­son of Re­solve Op­tics com­ments “A large pro­por­tion of off-the-shelf SWIR lenses are in fact vis­ible op­tics with an AR coat­ing de­signed for the SWIR wave­band. These lenses do not ac­count for the way the glass trans­mits in the SWIR re­gion and as such the fi­nal im­age qual­ity can of­ten be com­prom­ised. This prob­lem is par­tic­u­larly ap­par­ent with high­er res­ol­u­tion SWIR sensors”.He adds “While us­ing off-the-shelf SWIR lenses in your sort­ing in­stru­ment design may ap­peal due to lower cost it of­ten comes with ac­cept­ing com­prom­ises such as poorer per­form­ance, lower res­ol­u­tion and a bulki­er less at­tract­ive product design. All of which ul­ti­mately lead to a less ef­fect­ive and less ap­peal­ing re­cycled plastics sort­er. Con­sequently, de­mand for in­stru­ment op­tim­ized ver­sion of our Mod­el 363 SWIR lens that ex­actly meet the needs of plastics re­cyc­ling ap­plic­a­tions are rising dra­mat­ic­ally”.

Re­solve Op­tics 16mm fo­cal length Mod­el 363 lens uses care­fully se­lec­ted glass types and AR coat­ings to en­sure max­im­um trans­mis­sion, col­our cor­rec­tion and best im­age qual­ity throughout the SWIR wave­band. Op­er­at­ing at f/1.6, with less than 2 per cent geo­met­ric dis­tor­tion, the Mod­el 363 lens pro­duces a clear crisp 12.8mm dia­met­er im­age.

The new wen­glor P1PH9 re­flex sensor re­li­ably checks the pres­ence of ob­jects over long dis­tances. By com­bin­ing time-of-flight tech­no­logy with vis­ible red LED light, the P1PH9 sensors en­able the de­tec­tion of ob­jects at dis­tances of up to 2,500 mm. Thanks to the en­larged light spot, pres­ence checks can be per­formed for ob­jects of a wide range of shapes. The in­teg­rated dy­nam­ic ad­just­ment of the emit­ted light bright­ness en­sures re­li­able switch­ing. In ad­di­tion, the high in­ter­fer­ence im­munity makes the re­flex sensors ro­bust against am­bi­ent light, re­flec­tions and con­tam­in­a­tion. 

IO-Link para­met­er­iz­a­tion

Black sur­faces are also re­li­ably de­tec­ted by the red LED light, even if the ob­jects are ir­reg­u­larly shaped or have per­for­a­tions. P1PH9 sensors are highly im­mune to in­ter­fer­ence such as am­bi­ent light, back­ground re­flec­tions, con­tam­in­a­tion and dust. IO-Link 1.1 en­ables quick and easy para­met­er­iz­a­tion and ac­cess to pro­cess data. The switch­ing dis­tance can be eas­ily ad­jus­ted us­ing the po­ten­tiomet­er. The high­er de­tec­tion range and the 1P format with a ro­tat­ing plug al­low for flex­ible mount­ing op­tions.
 

FLIR in­tro­duces two new thermal spot cam­er­as: the FLIR TG268 and TG298. These thermal ima­ging cam­er­as provide pro­fes­sion­als in the util­ity, man­u­fac­tur­ing, elec­tric­al, auto­mot­ive and in­dus­tri­al sec­tors with a light­weight, port­able and af­ford­able tool for con­di­tion mon­it­or­ing that fea­tures a num­ber of key im­prove­ments. Among the im­prove­ments FLIR has im­ple­men­ted are high­er tem­per­at­ure ranges to cov­er even more ap­plic­a­tions, im­proved thermal im­age res­ol­u­tion and in­creased data stor­age ca­pa­city. FLIR also in­tro­duces on-cam­era con­di­tion mon­it­or­ing and con­nectiv­ity to its METERLiNK app for file trans­fer to mo­bile devices.

The FLIR TG268 thermal spot tem­per­at­ure cam­era takes users bey­ond the lim­it­a­tions of single spot IR ther­mo­met­ers to view and as­sess hot and cold spots that can in­dic­ate po­ten­tially dan­ger­ous prob­lems. Per­fect for the un­com­prom­ising de­mands of com­mer­cial elec­tric­al, build­ing main­ten­ance and HVAC ap­plic­a­tions, this in­nov­at­ive thermal ima­ging cam­era re­duces dia­gnost­ic time by provid­ing tar­geted tem­per­at­ure de­tec­tion (with a bull­seye laser cap­ab­il­ity), while sim­pli­fy­ing re­pair and main­ten­ance re­port­ing.

Built to with­stand harsh op­er­at­ing en­vir­on­ments, the FLIR TG268 fea­tures an in­dus­tri­al design with IP54 rat­ing, 2-metre drop test, 100-bright flash­light and Type K ther­mo­couple. Its fast start-up time of ap­prox­im­ately 6 seconds en­sures that it is ready to check everything from elec­tric­al con­nec­tions to mech­an­ic­al fail­ures quickly and ac­cur­ately. It meas­ures from -25°C to 400°C (752°F) with a 24:1 spot size ra­tio and a bull­seye laser point­er.

Multi-spec­tral im­age en­hance­ment

The im­ager of­fers im­proved de­tail of nat­ive thermal im­ages with Su­per Res­ol­u­tion (up­scal­ing to best-in-class 320×240). To help dia­gnose prob­lems faster, it of­fers FLIR's pat­en­ted MSX® (Multi-Spec­tral Dy­nam­ic Ima­ging) im­age en­hance­ment. With MSX, users can add de­tail by em­boss­ing visu­al scene de­tails onto full thermal im­ages, provid­ing ad­di­tion­al con­text to ac­cur­ately tar­get po­ten­tial faults and troubleshoot re­pairs.

The FLIR METERLiNK app (with Ig­nite Sync) can be used to take meas­ure­ments re­motely (from a safe dis­tance) and doc­u­ment in­spec­tion data for field re­port­ing and shar­ing. The app provides a live view of data read­ings from up to sev­en paired devices.

For high tem­per­at­ures

The FLIR TG298 is an in­dus­tri­al thermal dia­gnost­ic tool that provides ac­cur­ate tem­per­at­ure meas­ure­ment and the abil­ity to im­age up to 1080°C (1976°F) with a 30:1 spot size ra­tio and bull­seye laser point­er. Ap­plic­a­tions in­clude tem­per­at­ure meas­ure­ment and re­mote mon­it­or­ing of high tem­per­at­ure ap­plic­a­tions such as glass fur­naces, kilns and forges, as well as man­u­fac­tur­ing ap­plic­a­tions.