Siemens and Ger­man cli­mate tech­no­logy com­pany Ucaneo have partnered to scale elec­tro­chem­ic­al Dir­ect Air Cap­ture (DAC) tech­no­logy from in­dus­tri­al pi­lot to com­mer­cial scale – with Siemens de­ploy­ing the Siemens Xcel­er­at­or port­fo­lio as Ucaneo's pre­ferred auto­ma­tion and di­git­al­iz­a­tion part­ner. To­geth­er, the com­pan­ies are cre­at­ing a stand­ard­ized and glob­ally rep­lic­able auto­ma­tion plat­form that will en­able rap­id de­ploy­ment by Ucaneo and its li­censed op­er­at­ors world­wide. By 2035, Ucaneo tar­gets the an­nu­al cap­ture of half a gigaton of CO₂ from the at­mo­sphere, which is roughly equi­val­ent to can­cel­ling out the en­tire an­nu­al CO₂ emis­sions of Canada.

The part­ner­ship ad­dresses a grow­ing in­dus­tri­al chal­lenge: sec­tors from avi­ation to chem­ic­als in­creas­ingly re­quire ac­cess to sus­tain­ably sourced CO₂ as a feed­stock – and large-scale Dir­ect Air Cap­ture of­fers a scal­able solu­tion, re­pla­cing fossil-de­rived car­bon with CO₂ cap­tured dir­ectly from the at­mo­sphere.

First-of-a-kind DAC plant

Ucaneo has de­veloped an elec­tro­chem­ic­al DAC pro­cess, in­spired by the hu­man lung, that re­moves CO₂ dir­ectly from am­bi­ent air and de­liv­ers high-pur­ity CO₂ at over 99.9 per­cent pur­ity. The res­ult­ing CO₂ can be per­man­ently stored to gen­er­ate cer­ti­fied neg­at­ive emis­sions or used as a feed­stock for cli­mate-neut­ral products in­clud­ing sus­tain­able avi­ation fuel (SAF), meth­an­ol and food and bever­age ap­plic­a­tions. The fully elec­tri­fied pro­cess in­teg­rates dir­ectly with re­new­able en­ergy sources and re­sponds flex­ibly to grid con­di­tions and power mar­ket prices.

Ucaneo's first-of-a-kind in­dus­tri­al plant in Ber­lin (Ger­many), with a name­plate ca­pa­city of 150 met­ric tons of CO₂ per year, is set to be­come Ger­many's largest DAC fa­cil­ity upon com­mis­sion­ing in Ju­ly 2026. The fa­cil­ity will be of­fi­cially in­augured on Ju­ly 2 in Ber­lin. Part of the cap­tured CO₂ will be per­man­ently stored in geo­lo­gic­al form­a­tions, mak­ing the fa­cil­ity Ger­many's first veri­fied Dir­ect Air Cap­ture project com­bined with geo­lo­gic­al stor­age. This makes Ucaneo the first com­pany in Ger­many – and one of few glob­ally – to per­man­ently store CO₂ cap­tured through Dir­ect Air Cap­ture. A fol­low-on com­mer­cial plant with ap­prox­im­ately ten times the ca­pa­city is already in the de­vel­op­ment stages start­ing con­struc­tion next year.

Auto­ma­tion and di­git­al tech­no­logy 

Un­der the part­ner­ship, Siemens provides com­pre­hens­ive sup­port across pro­cess auto­ma­tion, in­stru­ment­a­tion and ana­lyt­ics, drive tech­no­logy and di­git­al­iz­a­tion. Siemens' pro­cess sim­u­la­tion soft­ware and con­trol­lers are already de­ployed at Ucaneo’s pi­lot plant, com­ple­men­ted by auto­ma­tion con­sult­ing ser­vices from Siemens. 

For sub­sequent project phases, Siemens' ad­vanced dis­trib­uted con­trol sys­tem Simat­ic PCS neo and ad­di­tion­al sim­u­la­tion soft­ware are planned. These solu­tions will en­able full pro­cess val­id­a­tion in a vir­tu­al en­vir­on­ment be­fore phys­ic­al com­mis­sion­ing, thereby re­du­cing tech­nic­al risk dur­ing scale-up. The stra­tegic ob­ject­ive is a stand­ard­ized, mod­u­larly scal­able auto­ma­tion tem­plate that can be rep­lic­ated across fu­ture Ucaneo plants and those of li­censed op­er­at­ors world­wide. This will help to ac­cel­er­ate glob­al rol­lout while safe­guard­ing cap­it­al ef­fi­ciency at each de­ploy­ment stage.

Grow­ing de­mand for in­dus­tri­al CO₂

The need for CO₂ as an in­put is grow­ing across mul­tiple in­dus­tri­al sec­tors – from sus­tain­able avi­ation fuel and meth­an­ol pro­duc­tion to food and bever­age ap­plic­a­tions. Reg­u­lat­ory re­quire­ments are ac­cel­er­at­ing that trend: un­der the Re­FuelEU ini­ti­at­ive, e-ker­osene must ac­count for 1.2 per­cent of all jet fuel sup­plied at EU air­ports by 2030, rising to 35 per­cent by 2050. The EU Car­bon Re­mov­al Cer­ti­fic­a­tion Frame­work (CRCF) is es­tab­lish­ing a cer­ti­fic­a­tion sys­tem for per­man­ent car­bon re­mov­al cred­its. For DAC op­er­at­ors, this es­tab­lishes a second com­mer­cial path­way along­side dir­ect CO₂ sales.
 

Each year, HAN­NOV­ER MESSE or­gan­izes the RO­BOT­ICS AWARD to re­cog­nize out­stand­ing tech­no­lo­gic­al in­nov­a­tions that have the po­ten­tial to trans­form man­u­fac­tur­ing. An in­de­pend­ent jury eval­u­ates the sub­mis­sions and nom­in­ates three solu­tions. The fo­cus is on mar­ket-ready products with a high de­gree of in­nov­a­tion, clear in­dus­tri­al po­ten­tial, and con­vin­cing eco­nom­ic vi­ab­il­ity. Com­pan­ies and in­sti­tu­tions from Ger­many and abroad are eli­gible to par­ti­cip­ate in the com­pet­i­tion, re­gard­less of wheth­er they ex­hib­it at HAN­NOV­ER MESSE.

Dur­ing the awards ce­re­mony, the three nom­in­ees present their solu­tions to mem­bers of the me­dia from roughly 20 coun­tries. The win­ner is then an­nounced. All nom­in­ees re­ceive a par­ti­cip­a­tion pack­age for HAN­NOV­ER MESSE, which in­cludes ex­hib­i­tion space in the Ap­plic­a­tion Park and a present­a­tion slot. In­ter­ested com­pan­ies can sub­mit their ap­plic­a­tion here: ht­tps://ro­bot­ics-award2027.al­pha-awards.com/au­th/lo­gin?show_success=true

Good­Bytz won the RO­BOT­ICS AWARD 2026

The star­tup Good­Bytz won the Ro­bot­ics Award 2026 for its kit­chen sys­tem that uses light­weight, com­pact in­dus­tri­al ro­bots. Ap­pro­pri­ate seals, food-grade ma­ter­i­als, and a high level of pro­tec­tion against heat, mois­ture, and clean­ing pro­cesses en­able its ro­bots to meet the re­quire­ments of food pro­cessing.

The next HAN­NOV­ER MESSE runs from 5 to 8 April 2027 in Han­over, Ger­many. Spain is Part­ner Coun­try.
 

As in­dus­tries con­tin­ue to de­mand in­creas­ingly ac­cur­ate aero­dy­nam­ic and flu­id flow meas­ure­ment cap­ab­il­it­ies, the part­ner­ship en­ables or­gan­isa­tions to ac­cess re­li­able, high-qual­ity solu­tions that sup­port re­search, de­vel­op­ment, test­ing, and op­er­a­tion­al per­form­ance. Cus­tom­ers will be­ne­fit from stream­lined pro­cure­ment, loc­al tech­nic­al sup­port, and en­hanced ac­cess to spe­cial­ist meas­ure­ment tech­no­lo­gies. The agree­ment re­flects a shared com­mit­ment between both or­gan­isa­tions to de­liv­er­ing in­nov­at­ive end-to-end pre­ci­sion en­gin­eered solu­tions that help cus­tom­ers im­prove ef­fi­ciency, op­tim­ise per­form­ance, and achieve more ac­cur­ate meas­ure­ment res­ults in de­mand­ing en­vir­on­ments.

Com­ment­ing on the part­ner­ship, Paul Crowhurst, Founder and CEO of Evol­u­tion Meas­ure­ment Group, said:

"We are de­lighted to part­ner with Aero Sensor and bring their highly re­spec­ted flow probe tech­no­lo­gies to our cli­ents. Their repu­ta­tion for pre­ci­sion en­gin­eer­ing and meas­ure­ment ex­cel­lence aligns per­fectly with our com­mit­ment to provid­ing in­dustry-lead­ing test and meas­ure­ment solu­tions. To­geth­er, we will sup­port en­gin­eers, re­search­ers, aerospace and auto­mot­ive pro­fes­sion­als with the tools they need to achieve ac­cur­ate and re­li­able aero­dy­nam­ic meas­ure­ments.

The part­ner­ship rep­res­ents an­oth­er im­port­ant step in Evol­u­tion Meas­ure­ment Group’s strategy to ex­pand its of­fer­ing of spe­cial­ist test and meas­ure­ment tech­no­lo­gies while provid­ing cus­tom­ers with ac­cess to world-class in­stru­ment­a­tion and tech­nic­al ex­pert­ise.”

Barney Gar­rood, Founder and CEO of Aero Sensor Lim­ited ad­ded, “We are ex­cited to be part­ner­ing with Evol­u­tion Meas­ure­ment Group to of­fer our cus­tom­ers a turn­key solu­tion that com­bines our ex­pert­ise in aero­dy­nam­ic probe design and man­u­fac­ture with their in­dustry-lead­ing pres­sure meas­ure­ment sys­tems.

At Aero Sensor, our ob­ject­ive is to bring best-in-class flow meas­ure­ment cap­ab­il­it­ies to en­gin­eers at all levels, from uni­versity stu­dents through to rock­et sci­ent­ists.  The data from our pre­ci­sion-en­gin­eered probes is only as good as the pres­sure meas­ure­ment in­stru­ment­a­tion be­hind it, so this part­ner­ship en­ables us to draw on Evol­u­tion’s ex­per­i­ence in this field to pair our probes with the op­tim­al meas­ure­ment sys­tems. As we con­tin­ue to grow our cus­tom­er base, this part­ner­ship will al­low us to of­fer both new and ex­ist­ing cus­tom­ers world-lead­ing end-to-end flow meas­ure­ment solu­tions.”
 

Di­git­al trans­form­a­tion in oil and gas moves for­ward when tech­no­logy proves its value in real op­er­at­ing con­di­tions. AUTOMA 2026, tak­ing place on 5-6 Oc­to­ber in Am­s­ter­dam, centres the dis­cus­sion on this prac­tic­al di­men­sion of di­git­al ma­tur­ity. The Con­gress presents an in­dustry-driv­en agenda groun­ded in op­er­a­tion­al ex­per­i­ence across the value chain, with in­sights shared by lead­ing or­gan­isa­tions in­clud­ing Shell, Repsol and Linde.

Op­tim­isa­tion for as­set per­form­ance and re­si­li­ence

Over two days, lead­ers from more than 190 com­pan­ies meet with­in a closed-door format that in­cludes more than 260 B2B meet­ings. Ex­ec­ut­ives, en­gin­eers and di­git­al spe­cial­ists ex­plore how data in­fra­struc­ture, in­dus­tri­al soft­ware and in­tel­li­gent sys­tems strengthen de­cision-mak­ing, op­tim­ise as­set per­form­ance and sup­port op­er­a­tion­al re­si­li­ence. The dis­cus­sions fo­cus on ap­plied use of AI, autonom­ous op­er­a­tions and di­git­al twins, high­light­ing tan­gible res­ults in ef­fi­ciency and de­car­bon­isa­tion.

At AUTOMA 2026, stra­tegic pri­or­it­ies are ex­amined through en­gin­eer­ing prac­tice and real project im­ple­ment­a­tion. Case stud­ies and tech­nic­al ex­changes il­lus­trate how di­git­al solu­tions are in­teg­rated in­to com­plex in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ments, while col­lab­or­at­ive dia­logue between or­gan­isa­tions sup­ports faster and more ef­fect­ive de­ploy­ment.

You can re­gister and book your spot at or­gan­izer’s webpage: ht­tps://sh.bgs.group/42g 

Con­gress web­site: ht­tps://sh.bgs.group/42f
 

Crit­ic­al Man­u­fac­tur­ing, the In­dus­tri­al Op­er­a­tions Plat­form com­pany that unites ex­e­cu­tion, con­nectiv­ity, ana­lyt­ics, and trus­ted AI, has ex­pan­ded in­to Taiwan. The move strengthens Crit­ic­al Man­u­fac­tur­ing’s com­mit­ment to Taiwan and sup­ports its broad­er growth across Asia-Pa­cific, where ad­vanced man­u­fac­tur­ers are ac­cel­er­at­ing di­git­al­isa­tion to man­age in­creas­ingly soph­ist­ic­ated pro­duc­tion re­quire­ments.

Cre­at­ing a uni­fied op­er­a­tion­al frame­work

Taiwan sits at the cen­ter of the glob­al semi­con­duct­or and elec­tron­ics sup­ply chain, with man­u­fac­tur­ers co­ordin­at­ing highly spe­cial­ised pro­cesses, strict qual­ity re­quire­ments, and rap­id pro­duc­tion cycles across in­creas­ingly con­nec­ted factor­ies.

Crit­ic­al Man­u­fac­tur­ing’s MES-powered In­dus­tri­al Op­er­a­tions Plat­form helps man­u­fac­tur­ers ad­dress these chal­lenges by bring­ing pro­duc­tion ex­e­cu­tion, auto­ma­tion, ana­lyt­ics, and trus­ted AI in­to a uni­fied op­er­a­tion­al frame­work. With MES as the ex­e­cu­tion core, the plat­form en­ables man­u­fac­tur­ers to cap­ture data at source, con­nect it across sys­tems and sites, and turn it in­to in­tel­li­gence that sup­ports faster and more con­fid­ent de­cision mak­ing.

“Taiwan is a crit­ic­al mar­ket for ad­vanced man­u­fac­tur­ing and a cent­ral part of the glob­al semi­con­duct­or eco­sys­tem,” said Fran­cisco Almada Lobo, CEO and co-founder of Crit­ic­al Man­u­fac­tur­ing. “Our pres­ence here re­flects both the strength of the cus­tom­er base we already serve in the re­gion and the im­port­ance of be­ing close to a mar­ket with sig­ni­fic­ant growth po­ten­tial, where man­u­fac­tur­ers’ op­er­a­tions de­mand high levels of pre­ci­sion, agil­ity, and con­trol. With a ded­ic­ated loc­al en­tity, we are bet­ter po­si­tioned to sup­port our ex­ist­ing cus­tom­ers and help more man­u­fac­tur­ers scale com­plex op­er­a­tions and move to­wards more in­tel­li­gent pro­duc­tion en­vir­on­ments.”

The op­er­a­tions are led by Neil Chen, Man­aging Dir­ect­or of Crit­ic­al Man­u­fac­tur­ing in Taiwan. Chen brings ex­tens­ive ex­per­i­ence with Crit­ic­al Man­u­fac­tur­ing’s MES tech­no­logy, hav­ing worked with the com­pany across con­sult­ing, soft­ware en­gin­eer­ing, sys­tem design, cus­tom­er train­ing, and MES cus­tom­isa­tion. 

"I am hon­oured to lead Crit­ic­al Man­u­fac­tur­ing in Taiwan as we take this im­port­ant step in the mar­ket,” said Neil Chen, Man­aging Dir­ect­or of Crit­ic­al Man­u­fac­tur­ing in Taiwan. “For our cus­tom­ers, the value of MES is not only in the tech­no­logy it­self, but in how well it is im­ple­men­ted, ad­ap­ted, and sup­por­ted to fu­ture-proof their day-to-day op­er­a­tions. Our fo­cus will be to bring that ex­pert­ise closer to man­u­fac­tur­ers in Taiwan and help them get great­er value from their di­git­al man­u­fac­tur­ing in­vest­ments.”
 

The En­ergy Ef­fi­ciency Move­ment (EEM) has today pub­lished its third glob­al re­port on en­ergy ef­fi­ciency in­vest­ment in in­dustry. The find­ings con­firm that the case for en­ergy ef­fi­ciency has nev­er been more widely ac­cep­ted, and that the gap between com­mit­ment and de­liv­ery has nev­er been more costly to ig­nore. 

The EEM is a glob­al net­work driv­ing aware­ness, ad­op­tion and de­vel­op­ment of en­ergy ef­fi­ciency solu­tions across all in­dus­tri­al sec­tors. It em­powers at scale the ad­op­tion of en­ergy ef­fi­ciency with­in in­dustry, to ac­cel­er­ate the world to­wards net-zero. ABB and Alfa Lav­al are found­ing mem­bers, at the mo­ment 600+ com­pan­ies are mem­bers of the grow­ing net­work.

The num­bers in the new re­port show that en­ergy now ac­counts for 23% of op­er­at­ing costs for busi­nesses sur­veyed. More than half (54%) say rising en­ergy prices pose a mod­er­ate or ma­jor threat to prof­it­ab­il­ity, a fig­ure that has grown with each suc­cess­ive EEM sur­vey since they began in 2022. In sec­tors with the highest en­ergy in­tens­ity, the ex­pos­ure is con­sid­er­ably more acute. For these busi­nesses, cop­ing with a per­man­ent en­ergy crisis, man­aging en­ergy use and man­aging fin­an­cial per­form­ance have be­come the same task.

More spe­cial­ists and data avail­ab­il­ity re­quired

The re­sponse across in­dustry has been de­cis­ive in in­tent. Nearly all or­gan­iz­a­tions sur­veyed (98%) are already in­vest­ing or act­ively plan­ning to in­vest — up from 93% in 2024. Half are tar­get­ing Net Zero with­in five years. But fin­an­cial dis­cip­line is shap­ing what gets fun­ded and what gets de­ferred: 83% re­quire a re­turn on en­ergy ef­fi­ciency in­vest­ment with­in five years, and 40% with­in two years. Nearly a third (31%) lack the spe­cial­ist re­source to im­ple­ment projects. A fur­ther 29% re­port a di­git­al skills gap, and al­most a quarter (23%) say they do not have suf­fi­cient data to jus­ti­fy in­vest­ment in­tern­ally. The in­fra­struc­ture for ac­tion is be­ing built; the ca­pa­city to act on it is lag­ging be­hind."The cost of in­ac­tion is now harder to jus­ti­fy than the cost of in­vest­ment, and busi­nesses know it," said

Mike Umiker, Man­aging Dir­ect­or of the En­ergy Ef­fi­ciency Move­ment. "The share of or­gan­iz­a­tions cit­ing up­front cost as their primary bar­ri­er has fallen from 53% in 2024 to 43% today. That ten-point drop tells us something im­port­ant: the fin­an­cial ar­gu­ment for en­ergy ef­fi­ciency is land­ing. But pro­gress is not ac­cel­er­at­ing to match. The bar­ri­ers that re­main are struc­tur­al; a short­age of skills, a lack of spe­cial­ist ex­pert­ise, and in too many cases, in­suf­fi­cient data to make the in­tern­al busi­ness case. Those are not prob­lems you can solve with a cheque."

In­dustry needs an in­teg­rated ap­proach

The re­port also points to a sig­ni­fic­ant broad­en­ing of where busi­nesses are dir­ect­ing in­vest­ment. The share of or­gan­iz­a­tions pri­or­it­iz­ing trans­port­a­tion and lo­gist­ics has ris­en from 37% in 2024 to 49% in 2026, re­flect­ing a move away from in­di­vidu­al as­set up­grades to­ward a sys­tem-wide view of en­ergy use. More than 60% have in­ves­ted in en­ergy audits and cloud data man­age­ment to build the found­a­tion for that wider ap­proach.

"En­ergy ef­fi­ciency is no longer a sus­tain­ab­il­ity top­ic in isol­a­tion, it has be­come a test of in­dus­tri­al com­pet­it­ive­ness and re­si­li­ence," Umiker ad­ded. "81% of or­gan­iz­a­tions say bet­ter fin­an­cing or gov­ern­ment in­cent­ives would in­crease their in­vest­ment, and more than half say they need ex­tern­al sup­port across four or more areas. The tools and the tech­no­lo­gies ex­ist. What is needed now is a stable frame­work across policy, fin­ance, and in­dustry to de­ploy them at the pace this mo­ment de­mands."

The find­ings land at the centre of a grow­ing glob­al de­bate on in­dus­tri­al en­ergy se­cur­ity. The IEA's Glob­al Con­fer­ence on En­ergy Ef­fi­ciency con­venes on 29-30 June, in Montreal, bring­ing to­geth­er gov­ern­ment min­is­ters, in­dustry lead­ers, and fin­an­cial in­sti­tu­tions to ad­dress ex­actly these chal­lenges. EEM will util­ize the re­port find­ings for the con­fer­ence, con­nect­ing the voice of 2,000 seni­or busi­ness de­cision-makers dir­ectly to the policy and in­vest­ment con­ver­sa­tions un­der­way.

The full re­port: “En­ergy Ef­fi­ciency In­vest­ment Re­port 2026: Rising en­ergy costs are out­pa­cing the ef­fi­ciency re­sponse” can be down­loaded on the or­gan­iz­a­tion’s web­site.

It cov­ers ma­jor en­ergy-in­tens­ive sec­tors across North Amer­ica, Europe, Asia-Pa­cific, and Lat­in Amer­ica. Sur­vey re­spond­ents were seni­or de­cision-makers at small, me­di­um and large or­gan­iz­a­tions. 

On June 23 a grant no­ti­fic­a­tion for Euro 127.4 mil­lion was presen­ted in Er­furt to X-FAB MEMS Foundry GmbH by Thuringia’s Min­is­ter Pres­id­ent Mario Voigt, Thuringia’s Min­is­ter of Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs Colette Boos-John, and Er­furt’s May­or An­dreas Horn. The fund­ing provided by the Ger­man fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and the Free State of Thuringia will sup­port the ex­pan­sion of man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pa­city through the con­struc­tion of a new clean­room at the Er­furt site. The “Fab4Micro” project is among the most sig­ni­fic­ant in­dus­tri­al in­vest­ments made in Thuringia in re­cent years. In Decem­ber 2025, the European Com­mis­sion gave the green light to the fund­ing. The project is an im­port­ant com­pon­ent of the European Chips Act (ECA), through which Europe aims to strengthen its tech­no­lo­gic­al in­de­pend­ence in semi­con­duct­ors.

The new fa­cil­ity is sched­uled to be­gin ini­tial pro­duc­tion by the end of 2028. This will en­able X FAB to ex­pand its pro­duc­tion ca­pa­city for mi­cro-elec­tro-mech­an­ic­al sys­tems (MEMS), highly in­teg­rated mi­crosys­tems, and photon­ics. The in­vest­ment will also es­tab­lish new man­u­fac­tur­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies for high-per­form­ance mi­crosys­tems that use het­ero­gen­eous in­teg­ra­tion tech­no­logy to com­bine nu­mer­ous elec­tron­ic and op­tic­al func­tions in a single com­pon­ent, re­quired for data cen­ters or op­tic­al sys­tems. The Fab4Micro project will also cre­ate new highly skilled jobs in the field of mi­crosys­tems.

Fu­ture-proof­ing tech­no­lo­gic­al sov­er­eignty

“The de­lib­er­ate in­vest­ment de­cision in fa­vour of the Er­furt site shows that the Free State of Thuringia is per­ceived as a com­pet­it­ive in­dus­tri­al loc­a­tion and of­fers ex­cel­lent con­di­tions for in­vest­ment. This fur­ther es­tab­lishes Thuringia as a ma­jor mi­cro­elec­tron­ics and semi­con­duct­or hub in the heart of Europe and se­cures high-qual­ity pro­duc­tion and jobs in Thuringia,” said Thuringia’s Min­is­ter Pres­id­ent Mario Voigt. “At the same time, Fab4Micro is a key project for the tech­no­lo­gic­al sov­er­eignty of Ger­many and Europe. Those who want to be in­de­pend­ent in the tech­no­lo­gies of to­mor­row must also be able to de­vel­op and pro­duce them them­selves. That is pre­cisely what this in­vest­ment in Er­furt stands for.”

“We greatly ap­pre­ci­ate the com­mit­ment of the Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment and the Free State of Thuringia in en­abling our Fab4Micro project. This fund­ing marks an im­port­ant mile­stone in trans­form­ing our Er­furt site in­to X-FAB’s mi­crosys­tems hub. As the place where X-FAB’s story began more than 30 years ago, Er­furt holds spe­cial sig­ni­fic­ance for our com­pany, and this in­vest­ment is a strong com­mit­ment to its fu­ture,” said Dami­en Macq, CEO of X FAB Group. “It sup­ports our strategy of spe­cial­iz­a­tion and di­ver­si­fic­a­tion while fur­ther strength­en­ing a site already re­cog­nized as a centre of ex­cel­lence for mi­crosys­tems tech­no­logy. The new clean­room will en­able us to ex­pand ca­pa­city and cap­ab­il­it­ies step by step, aligned with cus­tom­er de­mand and par­ti­cip­a­tion. With our ex­pert­ise in het­ero­gen­eous in­teg­ra­tion and ad­vanced wafer-scale as­sembly, the Fab4Micro project will also con­trib­ute to our activ­it­ies in emer­ging mar­kets such as photon­ics for data cen­ters.”

Dr. Gab­ri­el Kit­tler, Site CEO of X-FAB in Er­furt, ad­ded: “We are lay­ing the found­a­tion to in­dus­tri­al­ize in­nov­at­ive mi­crosys­tems and photon­ics solu­tions at scale and fur­ther strengthen Er­furt’s role in the semi­con­duct­or eco­sys­tem across Thuringia, Ger­many, and Europe. By provid­ing ac­cess to ad­vanced in­teg­ra­tion and pack­aging tech­no­lo­gies as well as man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pa­city — in­clud­ing for small and me­di­um-sized com­pan­ies that are of­ten hid­den cham­pi­ons in their mar­kets — we are mak­ing an im­port­ant con­tri­bu­tion to Europe’s sov­er­eignty in mi­cro­elec­tron­ics.”

The path lead­ing up to today’s present­a­tion of the grant no­ti­fic­a­tion was long and de­mand­ing, em­phas­ized Thuringia’s Min­is­ter of Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs Colette Boos-John. “X FAB was among the first Ger­man com­pan­ies whose projects re­ceived state aid ap­prov­al un­der the European Chips Act last year. The Free State of Thuringia has closely sup­por­ted the project from the very be­gin­ning and is also mak­ing a sub­stan­tial fund­ing con­tri­bu­tion.” While the Ger­man fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is provid­ing around Euro 80.3 mil­lion, Thuringia is con­trib­ut­ing a fur­ther Euro 47.1 mil­lion. This means that the Free State has taken on a sig­ni­fic­antly high­er share of the fund­ing than ori­gin­ally planned, thereby mak­ing a de­cis­ive con­tri­bu­tion to en­abling the project to be im­ple­men­ted. “Fab4Micro is a flag­ship project for Thuringia and Europe,” Boos-John con­tin­ued. “The fund­ing is money well in­ves­ted. The in­vest­ment strengthens our tech­no­lo­gic­al in­de­pend­ence in a stra­tegic­ally de­cis­ive fu­ture mar­ket and se­cures the long-term pro­spects of the Er­furt site.”

Er­furt’s May­or An­dreas Horn said: “X-FAB has been one of the de­fin­ing in­dus­tri­al com­pan­ies in our city for dec­ades. The de­cision to ex­pand in Er­furt sends a strong sig­nal for the en­tire busi­ness and tech­no­logy loc­a­tion. It strengthens the in­dus­tri­al base and in­creases Er­furt’s in­ter­na­tion­al vis­ib­il­ity as a high-tech loc­a­tion. The task now is to lever­age the mo­mentum gen­er­ated by this ma­jor in­vest­ment for the city.”
 

Emer­son an­nounced it will co-de­vel­op next-gen­er­a­tion cor­ro­sion man­age­ment solu­tions for the Saudi Ar­a­bi­an Oil Com­pany (Ara­mco), one of the world’s lead­ing in­teg­rated en­ergy and chem­ic­als com­pan­ies.

For Ara­mco, cor­ro­sion man­age­ment is a stra­tegic pri­or­ity tied dir­ectly to op­er­a­tion­al per­form­ance, safety and en­vir­on­ment­al re­spons­ib­il­ity. Con­tinu­ous cor­ro­sion mon­it­or­ing elim­in­ates dif­fi­cult, in­ef­fi­cient and dan­ger­ous manu­al cor­ro­sion meas­ure­ments and provides a re­li­able di­git­al data stream for im­proved de­cision-mak­ing.

Wall thick­ness mon­it­or­ing with con­tinu­ous data col­lec­tion 

As part of the cor­ro­sion re­search and de­vel­op­ment col­lab­or­a­tion, Ara­mco will com­bine its ex­pert­ise and in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­erty with Emer­son’s ad­vanced cor­ro­sion solu­tions to di­git­al­ise and trans­form cor­ro­sion man­age­ment. Emer­son will provide its tech­no­logy lead­er­ship in ul­tra­son­ic on­line cor­ro­sion mon­it­or­ing tech­no­logy; seam­less wire­less con­nectiv­ity for cor­ro­sion wall thick­ness mon­it­ors, and real-time and con­tinu­ous data col­lec­tion to de­vel­op a fit-for-pur­pose cor­ro­sion man­age­ment solu­tion for Ara­mco pro­cesses.

“Emer­son, with our com­plete tech­no­logy stack, is uniquely po­si­tioned to co-in­nov­ate the next-gen­er­a­tion cor­ro­sion mon­it­or­ing solu­tions that are cost-ef­fect­ive, scal­able and cus­tom­ised for Ara­mco,” said Ram Krish­nan, chief op­er­at­ing of­ficer for Emer­son. “We look for­ward to work­ing with Ara­mco to de­vel­op not only a cor­ro­sion solu­tion for its vast op­er­a­tions, but one that will also be a valu­able tool for many oth­er in­dus­tries.”

The vi­tal project is be­ing led by re­search­ers at the In­sti­tute of Her­it­age Sci­ence, part of the Na­tion­al Re­search Coun­cil of Italy (CNR), who are ex­plor­ing non-de­struct­ive ways to study and pre­serve what re­mains the only sur­viv­ing lib­rary from the an­cient Greco-Ro­man world.

Dis­covered dur­ing ex­cav­a­tions in the 18th cen­tury at the Villa dei Pa­piri in Her­cu­laneum, the scrolls sur­vived the vol­can­ic erup­tion through car­bon­iz­a­tion caused by in­tense heat and buri­al be­neath vol­can­ic ma­ter­i­al. While this ex­traordin­ary pro­cess pre­served the manuscripts, it also cre­ated ma­jor chal­lenges for his­tor­i­ans and con­ser­vat­ors at­tempt­ing to read and pro­tect them.

Many of the pa­pyri were mech­an­ic­ally un­rolled cen­tur­ies ago and moun­ted to sup­port­ing boards. However, the res­ult­ing frag­ments are ex­tremely fra­gile, of­ten heav­ily layered, and in many cases al­most un­read­able.

Con­ven­tion­al Ima­ging Falls Short

One of the prin­cip­al chal­lenges fa­cing re­search­ers is that both the car­bon­ized pa­pyr­us sub­strate and the ink are black, mak­ing dif­fer­en­ti­ation ex­tremely dif­fi­cult us­ing con­ven­tion­al ima­ging meth­ods as the con­trast in the vis­ible range is lost. Oth­er more soph­ist­ic­ated tech­niques like X-ray can work, par­tic­u­larly in com­bin­a­tion with ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, but are more com­plex and ex­pens­ive, re­quir­ing trans­port­a­tion of the pa­pyri to spe­cial labs where these tech­niques are avail­able.

To ad­dress these chal­lenges, con­ser­vat­ors turned to pulsed ther­mo­graphy, a tech­nique that com­bines con­trolled light ex­cit­a­tion with high-speed thermal ima­ging. The meth­od works by il­lu­min­at­ing the pa­pyr­us with a short pulse of light and re­cord­ing the res­ult­ing thermal re­sponse over time.

Sur­face in­scrip­tions be­come vis­ible al­most im­me­di­ately in the first few in­frared frames after ex­cit­a­tion be­cause the ink ab­sorbs light dif­fer­ently to the sur­round­ing pa­pyr­us ma­ter­i­al. As heat propag­ates through the sample over the fol­low­ing seconds, deep­er struc­tur­al de­tails and un­der­ly­ing fea­tures be­gin to emerge. This time-based thermal be­ha­viour provides re­search­ers with a way to dis­tin­guish writ­ing from sub­strate ma­ter­i­al.

Ad­vanced Thermal Ima­ging

Cent­ral to the project is the use of Flir X-Series thermal ima­ging cam­er­as. Com­bin­ing high-speed, high-sens­it­iv­ity in­frared ima­ging with ad­vanced thermal man­age­ment cap­ab­il­it­ies, the cam­er­as are ideal for sci­entif­ic and re­search en­vir­on­ments where pre­ci­sion and data in­teg­rity are vi­tal. 

Op­er­at­ing in the mid-wave in­frared spec­trum, Flir X-Series cam­er­as en­abled re­search­ers to cap­ture rap­id thermal events with ex­cep­tion­al sens­it­iv­ity, al­low­ing subtle tem­per­at­ure dif­fer­ences between inked and non-inked areas of the pa­pyri to be­come vis­ible dur­ing pulsed ther­mo­graphy ana­lys­is. The X-Series fea­tures a fast ana­logue lock-in in­put port de­signed to re­ceive ex­tern­al ref­er­ence sig­nals, en­abling high-speed thermal ana­lys­is at a sampling rate of 2.775 MHz This cap­ab­il­ity al­lows re­search­ers to de­tect faint sig­nals or minute tem­per­at­ure dif­fer­ences in ma­ter­i­als.

The re­search­ers used dual flash lamps to gen­er­ate con­trolled ex­cit­a­tion while lim­it­ing tem­per­at­ure in­creases with­in the pa­pyri to 2-3°C, well be­low any level con­sidered harm­ful to the an­cient ma­ter­i­al. Spe­cial fil­ter­ing sys­tems also pre­ven­ted ul­tra­vi­olet ex­pos­ure and min­im­ized un­wanted in­frared re­flec­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to the project team, the high sens­it­iv­ity, spa­tial res­ol­u­tion, and ad­vanced re­cord­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies of the Flir X-Series proved par­tic­u­larly im­port­ant when identi­fy­ing fine thermal con­trasts and pre­serving im­age clar­ity throughout the ac­quis­i­tion pro­cess. 

The abil­ity to stream and re­cord thermal data con­tinu­ously without dropped frames also sup­por­ted de­tailed post-pro­cessing and ana­lys­is us­ing Flir Re­search Stu­dio soft­ware.

Not­ably, the meth­od re­mains en­tirely non-con­tact and non-de­struct­ive, a crit­ic­al re­quire­ment when work­ing with fra­gile cul­tur­al her­it­age arte­facts that can­not be phys­ic­ally ma­nip­u­lated or re­moved from their his­tor­ic­al sup­ports.

Bey­ond Text Re­cov­ery

While the primary ob­ject­ive of the project in­volves re­veal­ing hid­den text, pulsed ther­mo­graphy also provides valu­able struc­tur­al in­form­a­tion for con­ser­va­tion spe­cial­ists.

As heat dif­fuses through the pa­pyr­us over longer times­cales, the thermal data be­gins to re­veal fea­tures such as fiber pat­terns, over­lap­ping lay­ers, and ad­he­sion points between the pa­pyr­us and its sup­port­ing board. These de­tails help con­ser­vat­ors bet­ter un­der­stand the phys­ic­al con­di­tion of the manuscripts and identi­fy areas where de­teri­or­a­tion or de­tach­ment may be oc­cur­ring.

The abil­ity to in­vest­ig­ate both writ­ing and sub­strate mor­pho­logy from the same thermal data­set provides sig­ni­fic­ant ad­vant­ages for res­tor­a­tion plan­ning and long-term pre­ser­va­tion strategies. The tech­nique is par­tic­u­larly use­ful be­cause some re­gions of the manuscripts con­tain mul­tiple com­pressed lay­ers cre­ated dur­ing the his­tor­ic­al un­rolling pro­cess. In these areas, un­der­ly­ing sec­tions re­mained at­tached rather than sep­ar­at­ing cleanly, cre­at­ing a com­plex struc­ture that is dif­fi­cult to ana­lyze us­ing tra­di­tion­al ima­ging meth­ods. 

The re­search­ers also noted that some com­pet­ing tech­no­lo­gies can in­volve bulki­er equip­ment, more re­strict­ive po­s­i­tion­ing re­quire­ments, or lower im­age defin­i­tion when ex­amin­ing layered ma­ter­i­al.

Fu­ture Po­ten­tial

One of the re­main­ing chal­lenges in­volves identi­fy­ing text loc­ated on the re­verse side of the pa­pyri or bur­ied with­in heav­ily layered sec­tions where only lim­ited ex­cit­a­tion light can pen­et­rate. Al­though pos­sible to de­tect re­sid­ual thermal in­form­a­tion from deep­er lay­ers, the res­ult­ing sig­nals be­come in­creas­ingly weak and blurred as heat dif­fuses through the ma­ter­i­al.

To help over­come these lim­it­a­tions, the CNR team is now ex­plor­ing the use of AI-based pro­cessing tech­niques. AI-as­sisted ana­lys­is could fur­ther en­hance dif­fer­en­ti­ation between the ink and the pa­pyr­us sub­strate, po­ten­tially im­prov­ing read­ab­il­ity and sup­port­ing fu­ture in­ter­pret­a­tion of the texts.

Whatever the fu­ture holds, the team is con­fid­ent that pulsed ther­mo­graphy is set to be­come an in­creas­ingly valu­able com­ple­ment­ary tool along­side oth­er ad­vanced her­it­age sci­ence tech­niques. This ex­cit­ing project has demon­strated the grow­ing role of Flir thermal ima­ging tech­no­logy in sci­entif­ic re­search and pre­ser­va­tion. By com­bin­ing high-speed thermal ac­quis­i­tion with ad­vanced ana­lys­is meth­ods, re­search­ers are now able to study some of the world´s most fra­gile his­tor­ic­al arte­facts in ways that were pre­vi­ously im­possible.
 

SST Sens­ing Ltd, a DwyerO­mega brand in­tro­duces a range of in­trins­ic­ally safe op­tic­al li­quid level switches ap­proved for haz­ard­ous areas. They are de­signed for use in de­mand­ing ap­plic­a­tions where dir­ect con­tact with hy­dro­car­bons, fuels, and flam­mable or ex­plos­ive li­quids is re­quired.

Us­ing in­nov­at­ive in­frared tech­no­logy and the prin­ciple of total in­tern­al re­flec­tion, these haz­ard­ous ap­proved switches are suit­able for a wide range of ap­plic­a­tions, in­clud­ing pres­ence or ab­sence of any li­quid, pet­ro­chem­ic­als/oil and gas, tank/con­tain­er level-con­trol, and down­stream ana­lyz­er pro­tec­tion. The switches of­fer an al­most in­stant­an­eous re­sponse time and switch point re­peat­ab­il­ity of +/- 1 mm, provid­ing highly ac­cur­ate read­ings, and re­quire no cal­ib­ra­tion.

Wide range of op­er­at­ing tem­per­at­ures

These li­quid level switches are highly ro­bust and res­ist­ant to chem­ic­al at­tack, with an op­er­at­ing tem­per­at­ure range between -30 and +80°C. The switches are housed in 316 stain­less steel and come with a choice of sens­ing tip ma­ter­i­als, mak­ing them ideal for use in chal­len­ging en­vir­on­ments. Cer­ti­fied to meet strin­gent ATEX and IECEx safety stand­ards, this sensor is suit­able for use in haz­ard­ous area zones 0, 1 & 2 and en­sures in­trins­ic safety by main­tain­ing en­ergy levels low enough to avoid ig­ni­tion risks, even in faulty con­di­tions, mak­ing it ideal for a wide range of ap­plic­a­tions and is de­signed for Equip­ment Groups IIA, IIB, and IIC with a tem­per­at­ure clas­si­fic­a­tion of T4 as defined by EN/IEC stand­ards 60079-0, and 60079-11 (latest ver­sions).
 

The new TURCK inductive IO-Link ring sensors reliably detect small metal parts. The highly configurable BIxR-W20 sensors address typical tasks in feeding systems, conveyor systems, and machining centers, replacing conventional variants with fixed functionality with a standardized, IO-Link-capable device concept. Users benefit from a reduction in the number of variants as well as additional diagnostic and process data, which is available directly via IO-Link.

Comprehensive condition monitoring data

A key feature of the sensors which are available in eight ring diameters ranging from 6 to 50 mm, is their flexible configurability: sensitivity, switching logic, output type, and static or dynamic operating mode can be set via both IO-Link and a teach adapter. In addition to process data, the devices provide comprehensive diagnostic information—such as operating hours, switching cycles, and temperatures—that supports condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. 

Typical applications include feeding systems for automatic screwdriving machines, part counting and sorting in conveyor systems, as well as wire breakage and jam detection. In dynamic mode, the ring sensors detect even very small and fast-moving parts with an adjustable pulse length and high repeatability.
 

On­do­Sense has de­veloped a meas­ure­ment sys­tem for the level mon­it­or­ing of mol­ten alu­min­um, steel or cop­per in­side closed fur­naces: The new On­do­Sense Fur­nace­Pro­tect radar solu­tion meas­ures the fill level in closed melt­ing, cast­ing and hold­ing fur­naces from the out­side through a small open­ing in the fur­nace lid of only ~50 mm. The radar sys­tem of­fers a meas­ure­ment ac­cur­acy of up to 0.3 mm, even in the pres­ence of dust, steam, smoke, vi­bra­tions and met­al tem­per­at­ures of up to 1600 °C. 

Sig­ni­fic­ant fluc­tu­ations in fill levels dur­ing the melt­ing pro­cess do not af­fect the meas­ure­ment pre­ci­sion or re­li­ab­il­ity. This is due to the unique com­bin­a­tion of a high meas­ure­ment rate (500 Hz) and smart fil­ter al­gorithms in­her­ent in On­do­Sense radar tech­no­logy. The level mon­it­or­ing sys­tem there­fore con­sist­ently de­liv­ers er­ror-free, highly ac­cur­ate and rap­id meas­ure­ments, even in the pres­ence of wave mo­tion, bubble form­a­tion or oth­er ab­rupt fill level fluc­tu­ations.

Easy in­teg­ra­tion & highest per­form­ance

Based on the On­do­Sense apex Level Line, the new On­do­Sense Fur­nace­Pro­tect radar sys­tem not only en­ables high­er pro­ductiv­ity in the op­er­a­tion of melt­ing, cast­ing and hold­ing fur­naces: It also re­duces en­ergy costs, op­tim­izes raw ma­ter­i­al us­age and pre­vents fur­nace over­filling. 

The new radar-based level meas­ure­ment solu­tion meets the highest re­quire­ments for heat, tem­per­at­ure or pres­sure res­ist­ance and can be in­teg­rated in­to melt­ing or hold­ing fur­naces very eas­ily. Thus, the On­do­Sense Fur­nace­Pro­tect hous­ing is simply moun­ted on the fur­nace lid, with the hous­ing’s pro­tect­ive tube in­ser­ted through an open­ing in the lid meas­ur­ing just ~50 mm.

The On­do­Sense Fur­nace­Pro­tect radar solu­tion is equipped with either an ad­vanced Profinet in­ter­face or a proven ana­log cur­rent in­ter­face (4–20 mA). It also of­fers three di­git­al switch­ing out­puts (PNP/NPN). The meas­ure­ment range ex­tends from 0.1 meters to 30 meters. The radar sys­tem fea­tures a web­serv­er-based con­fig­ur­a­tion soft­ware with pre-in­stalled ap­plic­a­tion pro­files, en­sur­ing simple and rap­id sensor com­mis­sion­ing.

No cal­ib­ra­tion or ra­di­ation pro­tec­tion re­quired

Un­til now, non-con­tact level meas­ure­ment of mol­ten alu­min­um or steel in closed melt­ing fur­naces was only pos­sible us­ing ra­diomet­ric meth­ods – which come with sev­er­al draw­backs: Meas­ure­ments in­volving ra­dio­act­ive iso­topes are sub­ject to strict reg­u­lat­ory ap­provals, ex­tens­ive safety train­ing, and rig­or­ous ra­di­ation pro­tec­tion re­quire­ments. Fur­ther­more, ra­diomet­ric sys­tems re­quire fre­quent re­cal­ib­ra­tion based on fur­nace wall thick­ness as well as the spe­cif­ic met­al or al­loy to en­sure re­li­able read­ings. The new On­do­Sense Fur­nace­Pro­tect radar solu­tion elim­in­ates these short­com­ings.

Sav­ings costs through de­term­in­a­tion of en­ergy re­quire­ments

The On­do­Sense Fur­nace­Pro­tect radar solu­tion en­ables a more ac­cur­ate meas­ure­ment of the en­ergy re­quired for melt­ing met­al: "Pre­cise level meas­ure­ment with­in the melt­ing fur­nace al­lows for a bet­ter es­tim­ate of the amount of met­al in­side. Con­sequently, the en­ergy re­quired to melt the met­al can be de­term­ined more ac­cur­ately. This saves en­ergy costs and en­ables bet­ter plan­ning of the melt­ing pro­cess. It also helps avoid fur­nace over­filling – which leads to un­ne­ces­sary raw ma­ter­i­al con­sump­tion, un­planned down­time, po­ten­tial ac­ci­dents, and high ad­di­tion­al costs," ex­plains Co-CEO Wal­ters­bach­er.

The level con­trol in melt­ing fur­naces is re­quired in par­tic­u­lar for the re­cyc­ling of scrap met­al such as alu­min­um, steel or cop­per to de­term­ine ex­actly when the met­al has fully melted. At the start of the melt­ing pro­cess, the still sol­id met­al scrap typ­ic­ally forms a pile in the cen­ter of the fur­nace, res­ult­ing in a lower level at the fur­nace rim. As the melt­ing pro­gresses, the level at the rim rises. Once the met­al has com­pletely melted, the level read­ings are uni­form throughout.
 

The AM 821 ana­logue mix­ing mod­ule from the SIG­MATEK S-DI­AS series com­bines eight ana­logue dif­fer­en­tial in­puts with 16-bit res­ol­u­tion and two ana­logue out­puts, each in the range of 0–10 volts. It en­ables the pre­cise and high-speed ac­quis­i­tion of ana­logue sensor sig­nals with a sampling rate of ≥ 500 μs for all chan­nels. A key fea­ture is its high flex­ib­il­ity: Each in­put and out­put can be in­di­vidu­ally switched between cur­rent and voltage sig­nals, sup­port­ing 0–20 mA, 4–20 mA, and 0–10 V.

Soft­ware-con­fig­ur­able in­put fil­ters

Thanks to its high res­ol­u­tion and freely con­fig­ur­able sig­nal types, the com­pact DIN rail mod­ule is ideal for ap­plic­a­tions with mixed sensor re­quire­ments – such as in meas­ure­ment tech­no­logy, labor­at­ory and ana­lyt­ic­al equip­ment, and test and eval­u­ation sys­tems. In ad­di­tion, the ana­logue mix­ing mod­ule fea­tures integ­rated short-cir­cuit de­tec­tion. Soft­ware-con­fig­ur­able in­put fil­ters help sup­press sig­nal noise. Status LEDs loc­ated dir­ectly on the mod­ule en­able chan­nel-spe­cif­ic dia­gnostics and sim­pli­fy com­mis­sion­ing and main­ten­ance. For easy cab­in­et in­teg­ra­tion, a cor­res­pond­ing EPLAN macro is avail­able for the AM 821. 

For years, build­ing a re­li­able cool­ing con­trol sys­tem for a data cen­ter meant as­sem­bling a patch­work of PLCs, gate­ways, and HMI pan­els: each one a po­ten­tial fail­ure point, each one adding weeks of de­ploy­ment. Unitron­ics set out to change that with the Un­iS­tream Solu­tion for Data Cen­ter. A single PLC+HMI that handles everything: con­trol, I/O, com­mu­nic­a­tion, visu­al­iz­a­tion, dia­gnostics, and cent­ral mon­it­or­ing, out of the box.

Auto­ma­tion en­gin­eers who spe­cify, design, and build data cen­ter cool­ing solu­tions have now voted Un­iS­tream the Gold Win­ner in the Con­trol En­gin­eer­ing Product of the Year Award. The votes came from qual­i­fied en­gin­eers and auto­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als who are in­volved in in­dus­tri­al con­trol sys­tems every day.

The Ar­chi­tec­ture 

The Un­iS­tream Solu­tion for Data Cen­ter cool­ing was de­signed from the ground up for the unique de­mands of data cen­ter en­vir­on­ments. Every com­pon­ent, pro­tocol, and cer­ti­fic­a­tion was chosen to meet the re­quire­ments OEM’s en­gin­eers ac­tu­ally face. It is equipped with nat­ive Red­fish and IPv6 sup­port for dir­ect in­teg­ra­tion with data cen­ter man­age­ment sys­tems and full OCP pro­file com­pli­ance. The sys­tem is pre-li­censed with BACnet, Mod­bus, SN­MP, REST API, and OPC-UA. No add-ons, ex­tern­al gate­ways or cus­tom de­vel­op­ments out­side the con­trol­ler are ne­ces­sary.

The Data Centre solu­tion provides built-in N+1 re­dund­ancy sup­port and mas­ter-slave group func­tion­al­ity, en­sur­ing con­tinu­ous cool­ing for mis­sion-crit­ic­al fail­over without the need for op­er­at­or in­ter­ven­tion. It comes with ISO 27001 cer­ti­fied cy­ber­se­cur­ity and built-in re­mote ac­cess via in­teg­rated Web Serv­er and VNC and is per­fectly de­signed for in-rack and In-raw CDUs, CRAC/CRAH, RD­Hx, chillers, im­mer­sion cool­ing, and air hand­ling units.

Avail­ab­il­ity

The Un­iS­tream Solu­tion for Data Cen­ter is avail­able now in two con­fig­ur­a­tions — DCB-CDU-US7-01 and DCB-CDU-USC-01 — each in­teg­rated and ready for de­ploy­ment, with all re­quired hard­ware, com­mu­nic­a­tion mod­ules, and soft­ware li­censes in­cluded. Full spe­cific­a­tions can be found on the web­site: www.unitron­ic­splc.com/data-cen­ter-solu­tions

Amit Har­ari, CEO of Unitron­ics com­men­ted on the award: "This Gold win is not just an award — it is mar­ket con­firm­a­tion that data cen­ter en­gin­eers are choos­ing a new stand­ard. One con­trol­ler, com­plete con­trol, built for the com­plex­ity of mod­ern data cen­ters."
 

The Pep­perl+Fuchs Clev­er­Read­er sta­tion­ary 1-D/2-D code read­er de­tects codes with max­im­um re­li­ab­il­ity, al­lows flex­ible con­fig­ur­a­tion, and of­fers an ex­cel­lent price-per­form­ance ra­tio. It is cap­able of high-speed read­ing and DPM code read­ing. Simple in­teg­ra­tion and in­tu­it­ive op­er­a­tion make it the ideal solu­tion in areas such as pack­aging, lo­gist­ics, and mi­cro­elec­tron­ics.
The sensor tech­no­logy re­li­ably reads all com­mon 1-D and 2-D codes, even on re­flect­ive sur­faces and dis­plays. With its com­pact design (24.3 × 41.5 × 49.5 mm), an RS-232 in­ter­face, and a 24 V/5 V con­vert­er cable with trig­ger con­nec­tion, it is easy and flex­ible to in­teg­rate. Para­met­er­iz­a­tion is per­formed con­veni­ently us­ing con­trol codes on the device or on the in­tu­it­ive graph­ic­al user in­ter­face.

The out­put string can be ad­ap­ted to feed the read­ing res­ult dir­ectly in­to the ERP sys­tem. Ad­di­tion­al func­tions such as auto­mat­ic er­ror im­age memory, match code, and vari­ous read­ing modes ex­tend the range of ap­plic­a­tions. The high-per­form­ance ver­sion VOI1100 re­cog­nizes codes in mo­tion up to 3.5 m/s as well as dir­ectly ap­plied codes (Dir­ect Part Mark­ing, DPM); the ba­sic ver­sion VOI1000 reads re­li­ably in stat­ic ap­plic­a­tions. Its unique price-per­form­ance ra­tio makes the Clev­er­Read­er a par­tic­u­larly cost-ef­fect­ive solu­tion in its class.
 

Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al Auto­ma­tion an­nounces the of­fi­cial avail­ab­il­ity of plant­Per­fect Mon­it­or 2.00. In ad­di­tion to PROFIB­US, plant­Per­fect Mon­it­or now also sup­ports PROFINET, ex­pand­ing its range of ap­plic­a­tions to Eth­er­net-based com­mu­nic­a­tion in­fra­struc­tures. With this en­hance­ment, Soft­ing ad­dresses the in­creas­ing ad­op­tion of hy­brid com­mu­nic­a­tion struc­tures in in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ments. Users can now cent­rally mon­it­or and ana­lyse both tra­di­tion­al field­bus and Eth­er­net-based net­works with­in a single ap­plic­a­tion.

The new PROFINET sup­port ex­pands the ex­ist­ing PROFIB­US func­tion­al­ity with ad­di­tion­al dia­gnost­ic, to­po­logy, and device data. As a res­ult, plant­Per­fect Mon­it­or evolves in­to a cent­ral­ized plat­form for mon­it­or­ing hy­brid com­mu­nic­a­tion net­works.

Users be­ne­fit from en­hanced ana­lys­is cap­ab­il­it­ies and end-to-end trans­par­ency across mixed net­work struc­tures with­in a single ap­plic­a­tion.

De­tect is­sues early 

plant­Per­fect Mon­it­or con­tinu­ously col­lects con­di­tion, dia­gnost­ic, and stat­ist­ic­al data from com­mu­nic­a­tion net­works and provides it cent­rally. Changes with­in the net­work, such as in­creas­ing er­ror rates or un­stable con­nec­tions, be­come vis­ible at an early stage. This en­ables users to de­tect is­sues be­fore they res­ult in un­planned down­time. The solu­tion thus sup­ports the trans­ition from re­act­ive troubleshoot­ing to con­di­tion-based main­ten­ance.

Trans­par­ency across net­works and devices

With its web-based user in­ter­face, the soft­ware provides a cent­ral­ized over­view of all mon­itored net­works and com­pon­ents. A live in­vent­ory that is auto­mat­ic­ally up­dated dis­plays con­nec­ted devices, their status, and rel­ev­ant dia­gnost­ic data. This sim­pli­fies troubleshoot­ing and re­duces down­time.

Sup­port­ing cy­ber­se­cur­ity and com­pli­ance

By con­tinu­ously stor­ing all net­work and device data in an in­teg­rated data­base, plant­Per­fect Mon­it­or trans­forms raw data in­to ac­tion­able in­sights. His­tor­ic­al ana­lyses and trend in­form­a­tion help main­ten­ance teams plan ser­vice activ­it­ies more ef­fect­ively and identi­fy weak points with­in the net­work in­fra­struc­ture.

Through con­tinu­ous in­vent­ory man­age­ment of devices and net­work struc­tures, plant­Per­fect Mon­it­or cre­ates trans­par­ency for se­cur­ity con­cepts and audits. This makes the solu­tion an im­port­ant build­ing block for im­ple­ment­ing mod­ern cy­ber­se­cur­ity strategies in pro­duc­tion en­vir­on­ments.

In­ter­ac­tion with smart­Link

plant­Per­fect Mon­it­or works to­geth­er with Soft­ing’s smart­Link com­pon­ents, which act as the cent­ral data in­ter­face between the field net­work and the mon­it­or­ing ap­plic­a­tion. These devices col­lect dia­gnost­ic and device data dir­ectly from PROFIB­US and PROFINET sys­tems and trans­fer it to the mon­it­or­ing soft­ware via a ded­ic­ated MQTT in­ter­face.

Flex­ible ar­chi­tec­ture for dif­fer­ent de­ploy­ment scen­ari­os

Thanks to its con­tain­er-based ar­chi­tec­ture, plant­Per­fect Mon­it­or can be flex­ibly in­teg­rated in­to ex­ist­ing IT and OT en­vir­on­ments. The solu­tion can be de­ployed both loc­ally and in vir­tu­al­ized or Dock­er-based in­fra­struc­tures. A scal­able li­cens­ing mod­el al­lows the solu­tion to be ad­ap­ted to dif­fer­ent plant sizes and re­quire­ments.
 

The Vis­ion AI La­bel Read­er from col­lect­ive mind GmbH (COMI) demon­strates how this com­plex­ity can be man­aged. The AI-based im­age pro­cessing sys­tem auto­mates the cap­ture and in­ter­pret­a­tion of item in­form­a­tion in goods-in and lo­gist­ics – re­gard­less of lay­out, lan­guage or code type. De­signed for in­dus­tri­al use, the solu­tion im­proves pro­cess re­li­ab­il­ity, en­hances data qual­ity and stream­lines work­flows. A uEye CP in­dus­tri­al cam­era from IDS Ima­ging De­vel­op­ment Sys­tems GmbH provides the im­age data re­quired for ana­lys­is.

Fully auto­mated cap­ture in­stead of manu­al in­spec­tion

The Vis­ion AI La­bel Read­er is de­signed for ap­plic­a­tions where a wide vari­ety of items, la­bels and pack­aging are pro­cessed on a daily basis. This makes it par­tic­u­larly suit­able for elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­ing ser­vice pro­viders as well as com­pan­ies with com­plex lo­gist­ics pro­cesses and ex­tens­ive in­vent­or­ies. One con­crete ex­ample is Rutronik Elektron­is­che Bauele­mente GmbH, a glob­ally lead­ing broad-line dis­trib­ut­or of elec­tron­ic com­pon­ents, where the sys­tem is already in suc­cess­ful op­er­a­tion. The goal is to auto­mat­ic­ally cap­ture all rel­ev­ant item in­form­a­tion and make it avail­able in a struc­tured format.

To achieve this, the sys­tem re­cog­nises all la­bels on an ob­ject, reads prin­ted text as well as 1D and 2D codes, and then in­ter­prets the con­tent us­ing ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. Hand­writ­ten entries can also be pro­cessed if re­quired. Cru­cially, re­cog­ni­tion does not rely on pre­defined la­bel stand­ards. New lay­outs, lan­guages or code formats can be handled without re­train­ing – a key factor for scalab­il­ity and long-term vi­ab­il­ity.

Cam­era and AI work­ing to­geth­er

A cent­ral com­pon­ent of the solu­tion is the in­dus­tri­al cam­era from the uEye CP fam­ily by IDS. It cap­tures la­bels and pack­aging sur­faces at high res­ol­u­tion and sup­plies the im­age data for AI ana­lys­is, re­li­ably de­tect­ing fine de­tails even un­der chal­len­ging con­di­tions. In prac­tice, re­flect­ive pack­aging such as dry packs, dam­aged codes or fluc­tu­at­ing light­ing con­di­tions place high de­mands on im­age ac­quis­i­tion. In com­bin­a­tion with a co­ordin­ated light­ing concept, however, the sys­tem achieves con­sist­ently stable re­cog­ni­tion per­form­ance. The use of a stand­ard vis­ion in­ter­face (USB3 Vis­ion) also sim­pli­fies con­nec­tion to in­dus­tri­al PCs and en­sures easy in­teg­ra­tion in­to ex­ist­ing sys­tems.

The com­pact mag­nesi­um hous­ing of the uEye CP (29 × 29 × 29 mm) is both light­weight and ro­bust, weigh­ing around 50 g. COMI uses a mod­el equipped with the light-sens­it­ive IMX183 rolling shut­ter CMOS sensor from Sony’s STAR­VIS series. Thanks to back-side il­lu­min­a­tion (BSI) tech­no­logy, it de­liv­ers re­li­able im­age qual­ity even in low-light con­di­tions. “With a res­ol­u­tion of 20.44 mega­pixels and a frame rate of al­most 20 frames per second, the cam­era provides ex­actly the level of de­tail we need to re­li­ably cap­ture even very small la­bel in­form­a­tion,” ex­plains To­bi­as Huse­mann, Seni­or Con­sult­ant at COMI.

Im­proved data qual­ity and end-to-end trace­ab­il­ity

Fol­low­ing im­age ac­quis­i­tion, the AI ana­lyses the data in sev­er­al stages: La­bels are loc­al­ised, con­tents ex­trac­ted and then se­mantic­ally in­ter­preted, for ex­ample to clearly as­sign part num­bers, batches or man­u­fac­turer in­form­a­tion. The res­ults are trans­ferred dir­ectly to con­nec­ted ERP sys­tems such as SAP or proAL­PHA, in­clud­ing real-time com­par­is­on and val­id­a­tion.
For users, this means a sig­ni­fic­ant re­duc­tion in manu­al in­spec­tion steps and sources of er­ror. At the same time, data qual­ity im­proves and com­plete doc­u­ment­a­tion of all item move­ments is cre­ated. The res­ult­ing 100 per cent trace­ab­il­ity is in­creas­ingly be­com­ing a de­cis­ive dif­fer­en­ti­at­or, par­tic­u­larly in view of stricter reg­u­lat­ory re­quire­ments in down­stream in­dus­tries such as med­ic­al tech­no­logy.

Im­proved ef­fi­ciency in goods re­ceipt

Com­pared with con­ven­tion­al multi-la­bel read­ers, prac­tic­al use shows an ef­fi­ciency gain of around 30 per cent in item cap­ture. Pro­cesses can be ac­cel­er­ated, per­son­nel re­sources de­ployed more ef­fect­ively and bot­tle­necks in goods-in re­duced. Auto­mated plaus­ib­il­ity checks of la­bel con­tent also in­crease pro­cess re­li­ab­il­ity and help identi­fy er­rors at an early stage.

Out­look: From tab­letop scan­ner to fully auto­mated sys­tem

The mar­ket is clearly mov­ing to­wards highly auto­mated item cap­ture. In fu­ture, the Vis­ion AI La­bel Read­er is set to move bey­ond use as a tab­letop scan­ner and be­come fully in­teg­rated in­to auto­mated ware­house and ma­ter­i­al flow solu­tions. This is already be­ing planned in col­lab­or­a­tion with sys­tem in­teg­rat­ors. Ac­cord­ing to Huse­mann, this also in­creases the de­mands placed on cam­era tech­no­logy: “It has to cope with chan­ging and some­times un­fa­vour­able light­ing con­di­tions and work re­li­ably on re­flect­ive sur­faces. At the same time, a large depth of field is re­quired, as la­bels and pack­aging are presen­ted at dif­fer­ent heights and dis­tances and still need to be cap­tured re­li­ably.”

In ad­di­tion, the func­tion­al scope of the ‘La­bel Read­er’ is to be ex­pan­ded gradu­ally. Along­side pure item cap­ture, top­ics such as an­om­aly and de­fect de­tec­tion are com­ing in­to fo­cus – for ex­ample identi­fy­ing dam­aged la­bels, ad­hes­ive residues or de­fect­ive items. This trans­forms AI-based im­age pro­cessing from a cap­ture sys­tem in­to a cent­ral qual­ity and in­spec­tion tool in goods-in. After all, tidi­ness is half the battle...
 

Cognex an­nounced the gen­er­al avail­ab­il­ity of One­Vi­sion™, its col­lab­or­at­ive AI vis­ion de­vel­op­ment en­vir­on­ment de­signed to sim­pli­fy and scale AI-powered in­spec­tion across man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tions.

Since its beta launch in June 2025, more than 100 cus­tom­ers world­wide have used One­Vi­sion to ac­cel­er­ate AI-powered vis­ion de­vel­op­ment and de­ploy­ment, with many pro­gress­ing from single-line ap­plic­a­tions to multi-site rol­louts in days in­stead of months. This mo­mentum re­flects a broad­er shift as man­u­fac­tur­ers move bey­ond isol­ated AI pi­lots to­ward con­nec­ted, en­ter­prise-wide in­spec­tion strategies.

"AI vis­ion has long de­livered value, but scal­ing it across op­er­a­tions has re­mained a bar­ri­er,” said Matt Moschner, Pres­id­ent and CEO of Cognex. "Man­u­fac­tur­ers en­counter re­cur­ring chal­lenges—from frag­men­ted work­flows to mod­els that don’t ad­apt across en­vir­on­ments. One­Vi­sion ad­dresses this by uni­fy­ing the sim­pli­city of the edge with the scalab­il­ity of the cloud, help­ing or­gan­iz­a­tions move from isol­ated pi­lots to con­sist­ent, en­ter­prise-wide de­ploy­ment."

Cloud-to-Edge Ar­chi­tec­ture for Scal­able AI Vis­ion

One­Vi­sion ad­dresses a per­sist­ent chal­lenge in in­dus­tri­al AI: de­ploy­ing ad­vanced vis­ion ap­plic­a­tions at en­ter­prise scale without adding com­plex­ity or slow­ing pro­duc­tion. This in­tro­duces a cloud-to-edge ar­chi­tec­ture, where AI mod­els are trained, man­aged, and gov­erned in the cloud, while in­spec­tion runs at the edge on Cognex vis­ion sys­tems for real-time, re­li­able ex­e­cu­tion. Cus­tom­ers can now man­age the en­tire AI li­fe­cycle cent­rally, from col­lect­ing and la­belling pro­duc­tion im­ages to re­fin­ing mod­els and de­ploy­ing con­sist­ent up­dates across glob­al fleets of devices. One­Vi­sion is op­tim­ized to work with Cognex’s latest sys­tems, in­clud­ing the In-Sight® 3900 and In-Sight® 6900.

While One­Vi­sion lever­ages the cloud for de­vel­op­ment and man­age­ment, runtime in­spec­tion re­mains fully edge-based. Once a mod­el is de­ployed, no con­nectiv­ity to the cloud is re­quired. Pro­duc­tion im­ages stay loc­al and latency is a non-is­sue.

By cent­ral­iz­ing mod­el de­vel­op­ment and man­age­ment, One­Vi­sion helps man­u­fac­tur­ers:

• Stand­ard­ize in­spec­tion pro­cesses across sites.
• Re­duce du­plic­a­tion of work across teams.
• Re­duce scal­ing costs by up to 50%.
• Main­tain ver­sion con­trol and con­sist­ency across de­ploy­ments.

Cus­tom­er Suc­cess: From Pi­lots to Glob­al Scale

Across in­dus­tries in­clud­ing auto­mot­ive, elec­tron­ics, food and bever­age, and health­care, cus­tom­ers are see­ing faster AI ap­plic­a­tion de­vel­op­ment, im­proved through­put, and more con­sist­ent in­spec­tion res­ults—while re­du­cing re­li­ance on spe­cial­ized ex­pert­ise and scal­ing de­ploy­ments glob­ally.

Es­sity – AI in­spec­tion de­vel­op­ment: from one year to one day

“With our pre­vi­ous ap­proach, de­vel­op­ing a re­li­able seal­ing in­spec­tion ap­plic­a­tion took more than a year of it­er­a­tion and tun­ing, and qual­ity is­sues could lead to full batch re­turns and sig­ni­fic­ant ma­ter­i­al waste,” said Amin Ta­jed­dine, Op­er­a­tion­al Tech­no­logy and Di­git­iz­a­tion Man­ager. “Us­ing One­Vi­sion, we were able to build and demon­strate a vi­able solu­tion in less than a day. One­Vi­sion’s sim­pli­city and ease of use sig­ni­fic­antly re­duced de­vel­op­ment ef­fort and gives us con­fid­ence in how quickly AI vis­ion ap­plic­a­tions can be scaled across our op­er­a­tions.”

Schneider Elec­tric – Stand­ard­iz­ing AI in­spec­tion for glob­al scale

“One­Vi­sion al­lowed us to de­vel­op and val­id­ate AI in­spec­tion stand­ards cent­rally and then de­ploy those same mod­els across our world­wide op­er­a­tions,” said Chris­tophe Ernis, Smart Op­er­a­tion Man­ager, Product Power Di­vi­sion. “That ap­proach helped us double yield, dra­mat­ic­ally re­duce false re­jects, and re­duce our de­pend­ence on spe­cial­ized vis­ion ex­pert­ise. Most im­port­antly, it gives us a re­peat­able way to scale best prac­tices re­li­ably across our factor­ies.”

3M – Im­prov­ing speed and col­lab­or­a­tion in AI vis­ion de­vel­op­ment

“With One­Vi­sion, our en­gin­eers can quickly la­bel real pro­duc­tion im­ages, build mod­els, and de­ploy them to cam­er­as with far less ef­fort,” said Scott Daniels, Seni­or Man­u­fac­tur­ing Tech­no­logy En­gin­eer.

The up­dated ISO 10218:2025 stand­ard ex­pands the scope of ro­bot­ics safety to in­clude the se­cure in­teg­ra­tion in­to ap­plic­a­tions and ro­bot­ic cell en­vir­on­ments. In ad­di­tion to po­s­i­tion and speed, force mon­it­or­ing, dy­nam­ic safety zones, and safety func­tions for col­lab­or­at­ive and par­tially col­lab­or­at­ive ap­plic­a­tions are re­ceiv­ing great­er fo­cus. 

The Kendri­on Safety Ar­chi­tec­ture for Ro­bot­ics com­bines a SIL3/PLe cer­ti­fied Safety PLC with a ro­bot­ics lib­rary for kin­emat­ic safety func­tions. The Safety PLC per­forms kin­emat­ic safety mon­it­or­ing of the en­tire ro­bot's move­ment and pro­cesses safety-rel­ev­ant data from all con­nec­ted axes and drives in real time. The sys­tem tracks the po­s­i­tion and speed of in­dus­tri­al ro­bots and co­bots, along with forces, torques, and cus­tom­iz­able safety zones. Kin­emat­ic safety func­tions are pro­cessed with a min­im­um cycle time of 2 ms. With suit­able FSoE drives (Fail Safe over Eth­er­CAT), safety func­tions such as STO and SS1, as well as ap­plic­a­tion-spe­cif­ic speed and zone mon­it­or­ing, can be im­ple­men­ted.

Scal­able for dif­fer­ent ro­bot­ics ap­plic­a­tions

Kendri­on provides its safety ar­chi­tec­ture in the ver­sions: Mo­tion, Force, and Zone. The Mo­tion ver­sion cov­ers po­s­i­tion and speed mon­it­or­ing for tra­di­tion­al in­dus­tri­al ro­bot ap­plic­a­tions. The Force ver­sion broadens its cap­ab­il­it­ies by in­clud­ing mod­el-based and op­tion­al sensor-based mon­it­or­ing of force and torque, mak­ing it par­tic­u­larly suit­able for hu­man-ro­bot col­lab­or­a­tion (HRC). The Zone ver­sion sup­ports mon­it­or­ing of up to 20 safety zones, al­low­ing flex­ible pro­tec­tion of work areas and ef­fi­cient im­ple­ment­a­tion of mod­ern HRC ap­plic­a­tions. The ar­chi­tec­ture ac­com­mod­ates seri­al ro­bot­ic struc­tures with two to nine axes, which can be either lin­ear or rotary.

Com­pat­ible with ex­ist­ing ro­bot­ics plat­forms

The Eth­er­CAT mas­ter com­mu­nic­ates dir­ectly with safe FSoE servo drives through the Kendri­on Safety PLC, en­abling con­tinu­ous safety com­mu­nic­a­tion for ro­bot sys­tems with up to nine axes. The Kendri­on safety ar­chi­tec­ture can be in­cor­por­ated in­to ex­ist­ing Eth­er­CAT-based ro­bot­ics sys­tems and works with stand­ard FSoE drives. There is no re­quire­ment to rely on pro­pri­et­ary ro­bot con­trol­lers. Man­u­fac­tur­ers have the flex­ib­il­ity to in­cor­por­ate their own func­tions, kin­emat­ics, and ad­di­tion­al I/O sys­tems. This fa­cil­it­ates the easy in­teg­ra­tion of laser scan­ners, en­coders, and oth­er safety-rel­ev­ant sensors in­to the safety ar­chi­tec­ture. The open sys­tem ar­chi­tec­ture cre­ates a high de­gree of flex­ib­il­ity for fu­ture ro­bot­ics plat­forms and sup­ports the im­ple­ment­a­tion of new safety re­quire­ments.
 

Wherever va­cu­um is used as an act­ive part of pro­duc­tion, know­ing the pres­sure level in the pro­cess is es­sen­tial for mon­it­or­ing, con­trolling, and op­tim­iz­ing per­form­ance. Va­cu­um gauges help keep pro­cesses stable, product qual­ity con­sist­ent, and sys­tem per­form­ance un­der con­trol. This is ex­actly why va­cu­um meas­ure­ment re­mains such a rel­ev­ant top­ic — even in ap­plic­a­tions where the gauges them­selves of­ten re­ceive little at­ten­tion.

In many ex­ist­ing sys­tems, ana­log gauges con­tin­ue to ful­fill this role re­li­ably. The tech­no­logy is well es­tab­lished, widely sup­por­ted by con­trol­lers and PLCs, and fa­mil­i­ar to en­gin­eer­ing and main­ten­ance teams.

At the same time, va­cu­um in­stru­ment­a­tion is gradu­ally be­com­ing more con­nec­ted. Di­git­al gauges of­fer new pos­sib­il­it­ies such as net­work com­mu­nic­a­tion, re­mote con­fig­ur­a­tion, and ad­di­tion­al dia­gnost­ic in­form­a­tion. This raises an im­port­ant ques­tion for many users: Does it make sense to stay with ana­log gauges — or is it time to con­sider a di­git­al up­grade? In prac­tice, the an­swer de­pends less on meas­ure­ment per­form­ance and more on how the gauge fits in­to the over­all sys­tem ar­chi­tec­ture.

1. Is the meas­ure­ment per­form­ance dif­fer­ent between ana­log and di­git­al gauges?

In many cases, ana­log and di­git­al gauges use the same sensor tech­no­logy. Meas­ure­ment prin­ciples such as Pir­ani, ca­pa­cit­ive, or cold cath­ode gauges re­main identic­al re­gard­less of the com­mu­nic­a­tion in­ter­face. This means the ac­cur­acy, re­peat­ab­il­ity, and meas­ure­ment range are typ­ic­ally un­changed between ana­log and di­git­al ver­sions. The main dif­fer­ence lies in how the pres­sure value is trans­mit­ted: ana­log gauges out­put elec­tric­al sig­nals such as 0–10 V or 4–20 mA, while di­git­al gauges trans­mit pres­sure data through com­mu­nic­a­tion pro­to­cols. As a res­ult, switch­ing to di­git­al does not im­prove the meas­ure­ment it­self. The be­ne­fits ap­pear in com­mu­nic­a­tion and sys­tem in­teg­ra­tion.

2. How does di­git­al com­mu­nic­a­tion im­prove sig­nal re­li­ab­il­ity?

Ana­log sig­nals can be af­fected by elec­tric­al noise, voltage drops, or elec­tro­mag­net­ic in­ter­fer­ence, par­tic­u­larly in in­stall­a­tions with long cable runs. These ef­fects can in­tro­duce de­vi­ations in the trans­mit­ted pres­sure sig­nal. Di­git­al gauges trans­mit pres­sure val­ues as data pack­ets rather than voltage levels. This ap­proach makes com­mu­nic­a­tion less sens­it­ive to sig­nal de­grad­a­tion and helps main­tain con­sist­ent read­ings even over longer dis­tances. For in­dus­tri­al sys­tems with dis­trib­uted com­pon­ents or ex­tens­ive wir­ing, this im­proved com­mu­nic­a­tion re­li­ab­il­ity can be an im­port­ant ad­vant­age.

3. Can di­git­al net­works re­duce cabling com­plex­ity?

Ana­log sys­tems typ­ic­ally re­quire one cable per gauge, each con­nect­ing dir­ectly to a con­trol­ler. In lar­ger va­cu­um sys­tems with mul­tiple gauges, this can quickly lead to ex­tens­ive wir­ing. Di­git­al gauges of­ten al­low mul­tiple devices to share a single com­mu­nic­a­tion line in a bus or daisy-chain con­fig­ur­a­tion. This ar­chi­tec­ture can sig­ni­fic­antly re­duce the amount of cabling re­quired. The be­ne­fits be­come par­tic­u­larly no­tice­able in large in­dus­tri­al ma­chines like coat­ing sys­tems where gauges are dis­trib­uted across a wide area.

4. What ad­di­tion­al in­form­a­tion do di­git­al gauges provide?

Ana­log gauges usu­ally provide only the pres­sure value. Di­git­al gauges, by con­trast, can trans­mit ad­di­tion­al in­form­a­tion in two dir­ec­tions through the com­mu­nic­a­tion in­ter­face. Ex­amples in­clude er­ror codes, device iden­ti­fic­a­tion, or con­fig­ur­a­tion para­met­ers. This in­form­a­tion type can sup­port troubleshoot­ing, doc­u­ment­a­tion, and sys­tem mon­it­or­ing in auto­mated in­stall­a­tions. Such ex­ten­ded data can help main­ten­ance teams identi­fy is­sues more quickly and bet­ter track the status of in­stalled gauges.

5. How does re­mote con­fig­ur­a­tion sim­pli­fy main­ten­ance?

Many ana­log gauges re­quire manu­al in­ter­ac­tion for ad­just­ments or con­fig­ur­a­tion. If a gauge is in­stalled in a dif­fi­cult-to-ac­cess po­s­i­tion, this can com­plic­ate routine main­ten­ance. Di­git­al gauges al­low cer­tain com­mands — such as ad­just­ment pro­ced­ures or para­met­er changes — to be sent dir­ectly through the com­mu­nic­a­tion in­ter­face. This en­ables con­fig­ur­a­tion or ad­just­ment steps to be per­formed re­motely from a con­trol­ler or com­puter. For sys­tems with mul­tiple gauges or com­plex in­stall­a­tions, this cap­ab­il­ity can re­duce main­ten­ance ef­fort and im­prove op­er­a­tion­al ef­fi­ciency.

When does it make sense to switch from ana­log to di­git­al gauges?

Ana­log gauges re­main a prac­tic­al solu­tion for many simple sys­tems. Di­git­al gauges, however, of­fer ad­vant­ages in com­mu­nic­a­tion re­li­ab­il­ity, cabling, and device func­tion­al­ity. As va­cu­um sys­tems be­come in­creas­ingly net­worked, these fea­tures are of­ten the main reas­on users con­sider trans­ition­ing to di­git­al in­stru­ment­a­tion. 
 

Ad­vantech an­nounced the in­teg­ra­tion of In­tel Core Series 3 pro­cessors in­to its next-gen­er­a­tion port­fo­lio of in­dus­tri­al-grade em­bed­ded boards and Edge AI sys­tems. This col­lab­or­a­tion strengthens the long-stand­ing part­ner­ship between Ad­vantech and In­tel, en­abling ef­fi­cient and bal­anced boards and edge sys­tems de­signed for light­weight edge AI in­fer­ence ap­plic­a­tions. 

Built on In­tel 18A pro­cess tech­no­logy, In­tel Core Series 3 in­tro­duces a hy­brid CPU design with up to 6 cores (2 Per­form­ance-cores and 4 Ef­fi­cient-cores), de­liv­er­ing up to 1.2x high­er single-thread per­form­ance com­pared to pre­vi­ous-gen­er­a­tion pro­cessors. With a new Xe3 graph­ics en­gine and in­teg­rated In­tel NPU 5.0, the ar­chi­tec­ture en­ables dis­trib­uted AI ac­cel­er­a­tion across CPU, GPU, and NPU, achiev­ing up to 40 TOPS of total AI per­form­ance.

In­dus­tri­al re­li­ab­il­ity and long-term avail­ab­il­ity

The ad­di­tion of a ded­ic­ated NPU in a main­stream In­tel Core Series 3 provides power-ef­fi­cient AI in­fer­ence op­tim­ized for al­ways-on edge work­loads. Com­bined with CPU and GPU com­pute cap­ab­il­it­ies, the solu­tion is well suited for light­weight edge AI in­fer­ence ap­plic­a­tions such as smart re­tail kiosks, self-check­out sys­tems, health­care as­sist­ance devices, and in­dus­tri­al ro­bot­ics, where re­spons­ive­ness, ef­fi­ciency, and re­li­ab­il­ity are es­sen­tial. In ad­di­tion to AI per­form­ance, the ar­chi­tec­ture is de­signed for long-term in­dus­tri­al use, of­fer­ing up to 10 years of product avail­ab­il­ity. It also sup­ports real-time com­put­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies through In­tel Time Co­ordin­ated Com­put­ing (TCC) and Time-Sens­it­ive Net­work­ing (TSN), en­abling de­term­in­ist­ic per­form­ance for auto­ma­tion and con­trol ap­plic­a­tions.

Ad­vantech plans to in­tro­duce mul­tiple In­tel Core Series 3-based sys­tems, in­clud­ing the MIO-5356 em­bed­ded single-board com­puter, the ARK-1252 DIN-rail edge com­puter, and the ARK-2233 fan­less edge com­puter. These sys­tems are de­signed to de­liv­er ef­fi­cient and bal­anced com­put­ing for light­weight edge AI in­fer­ence across di­verse in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions.
 

Mo­tors rated above 375 kW cur­rently use about 10,4% of glob­al elec­tri­city, a share ex­pec­ted to double by 2040. Ana­lys­is of over 1.000 ABB large syn­chron­ous mo­tors and gen­er­at­ors de­livered world­wide from ABB’s Västerås man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­ity in Sweden between 2015 and 2025 shows a per­sist­ent ef­fi­ciency gap between stand­ard spe­cific­a­tions and what ABB’s Top In­dus­tri­al Ef­fi­ciency (TIE) ap­proach can achieve us­ing proven tech­no­logy. This roughly 0.2% gap leads to $9,5 – 12  bil­lion in un­ne­ces­sary elec­tri­city costs and 60 – 75 mil­lion tons of avoid­able CO₂ over a 25-year life­time, des­pite pay­back peri­ods of months to three years.

As en­ergy de­mand grows, driv­en by AI and data cen­ters, in­dus­tri­al ef­fi­ciency is be­com­ing crit­ic­al. The TIE ini­ti­at­ive is ABB’s con­trac­tu­al com­mit­ment to de­liv­er large syn­chron­ous mo­tors and gen­er­at­ors with the highest pos­sible en­ergy ef­fi­ciency, without com­prom­ising re­li­ab­il­ity or spe­cific­a­tion com­pli­ance. Open to OEMs, EPCs and end users, it en­ables solu­tions op­tim­ized for li­fe­cycle per­form­ance rather than up­front cost.

TIE sys­tems of large syn­chron­ous mo­tors and gen­er­at­ors with the highest pos­sible en­ergy ef­fi­ciency reach about 98,7 – 98,8% ef­fi­ciency versus 98,5% stand­ard, with high­er gains pos­sible in some ap­plic­a­tions. Ap­ply­ing even the 0,2% im­prove­ment glob­ally could save 4 – 6 TWh an­nu­ally (power­ing up to 1 mil­lion house­holds) and 100 – 150 TWh over 25 years, cut­ting emis­sions by 60 – 75 mil­lion tons, equi­val­ent to re­mov­ing 13 - 16 mil­lion cars from the road. Gains of 1 to 1,5 per­cent­age points can be achieved in in some ap­plic­a­tions, par­tic­u­larly re­pla­cing in­duc­tion-based sys­tems.

To turn po­ten­tial in­to im­pact, the re­port sets out a clear set of ac­tions to ac­cel­er­ate ad­op­tion. It calls on in­dustry to move bey­ond up­front cost and em­bed en­ergy ef­fi­ciency in­to pro­cure­ment de­cisions, in­clud­ing spe­cify­ing min­im­um per­form­ance levels and re­quest­ing op­tim­ized designs.
The full re­port is avail­able at the ABB web­site here. 

IEN Europe: You star­ted the “Top In­dus­tri­al Ef­fi­ciency” Pro­gram for Large Mo­tors and Gen­er­at­ors. How big is the ac­tu­al gap and what can be gained by cus­tom­ers choos­ing to go that way?
Dav­id Bjer­hag: Launch­ing the pro­gram the idea be­hind “Top In­dus­tri­al Ef­fi­ciency” (TIE) was not to make it ABB spe­cif­ic, but to make it kind of open for every­one. Be­cause large mo­tors and gen­er­at­ors do have an im­pact. Based on the data about the units we de­livered from our Västerås plant between 2015 and 2025 we found that if they had been spe­cified un­der TIE, 11 ter­awatt hours could have been saved. And these mo­tors are already ef­fi­cient. 

But what I wanted to do is ac­tu­ally to ex­pand it fur­ther to make TIE ac­cess­ible for oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers of gen­er­at­ors and mo­tors, but also for tur­bines or com­pressors. 
So I've been trav­el­ing around a lot to cus­tom­ers, try­ing to in­tro­duce this op­tion to them. To change the sys­tem users and po­ten­tial cus­tom­ers need to know what the best per­form­ance of a product can be and what they should ask for, be it elec­tric mo­tors, gen­er­at­ors, tur­bines or com­pressors.

IEN Europe: But how big is the ef­fect cus­tom­ers can have? How much ef­fi­ciency can they gain? The cost and time you need to achieve a re­turn is al­ways in­ter­est­ing if you're think­ing about in­vest­ments?
Dav­id Bjer­hag: I mean, if we sim­pli­fy it, I would say the main step, for ex­ample in a com­pressor ap­plic­a­tion, would be to go from a com­bus­tion driv­en ap­plic­a­tion - take a gas tur­bine driv­en com­pressor - to elec­tric. So, there you go from about 35% ef­fi­ciency on a gas tur­bine to an elec­tric mo­tor that would have at least 97 or 98%, right?

That's the big step when you go elec­tric and that's why it is done. But if we look at the big com­pressors, most of them are ac­tu­ally now elec­tric driv­en. 

If you talk about an ef­fi­ciency in­creas­ing from 35% to 98%, then we're talk­ing about a lot of money. And you also have less main­ten­ance on an elec­tric mo­tor com­pared to a gas tur­bine, etc. The sav­ings can simply be cal­cu­lated tak­ing the num­ber of mega­watts, 8,000 hours a year, 25 years, and then mak­ing 60% ef­fi­ciency gain. So that's very, very fast pay­back. 

But even if you have a syn­chron­ous mo­tor already and then think about up­grad­ing for “Top In­dus­tri­al Ef­fi­ciency” with more premi­um thin ma­ter­i­als, more cop­per, et cet­era, the pay­back is some­where half a year to three years in all the cases we looked at.
And in ad­di­tion, you get oth­er ad­vant­ages as the cool­ing sys­tem gets smal­ler and the pip­ing gets less and also the en­gin­eer­ing is re­duced. 

So pos­it­ive ef­fects from dif­fer­ent sides are com­ing to­geth­er.

IEN Europe: What are the typ­ic­al in­dus­tries that can be­ne­fit from your of­fer­ing the most?
Dav­id Bjer­hag: If you take power gen­er­a­tion, there are a lot of op­por­tun­it­ies. The gen­er­at­ors typ­ic­ally pro­duce power 24-7, and there is quite a big mar­ket for gen­er­at­or.

Also in data cen­ters, their main fo­cus is on speed cur­rently and if they go for high­er ef­fi­ciency, that will achieve quite big sav­ings.

An­oth­er one is of course the oil and gas sec­tor with LNG. So, power fol­lowed by oil and gas would be the main two mar­kets as I see it, just be­cause of size of the mar­ket, but also that the op­por­tun­ity for high­er ef­fi­ciency is big­ger there cur­rently.

IEN Europe: Can you tell us in gen­er­al terms how you achieve the ef­fi­ciency gain in your TIE products and for your cus­tom­ers?
Gun­nar Porsby: We work with a lot of cal­cu­la­tion tools and soft­ware, pur­chased and de­veloped in-house help­ing us to design the ma­chines right. And de­pend­ing on the cus­tom­er’s pri­or­ity you can go in dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions of op­tim­iz­a­tion, e.g. cost op­tim­iz­a­tion to cre­ate the most cost-ef­fect­ive ma­chine pos­sible to meet the defined re­quire­ments. Then we also have cus­tom­ers like air sep­ar­a­tion in­dustry that want high ef­fi­ciency. So, we know how to design for ef­fi­ciency as well.

To op­tim­ize for ef­fi­ciency, we look at the elec­tric­al steel in the stator hav­ing a high­er grade. We look on how much cop­per we have in the wind­ing.

So, with a bit of premi­um thin­ner or high­er qual­it­at­ive ma­ter­i­als, we can get up­sides on ef­fi­ciency. Of course, you need also to design for it, but those are the cost drivers and ef­fi­ciency drivers.

The good thing as elec­tric­al de­sign­er for cus­tom­ized ma­chines is, you do this in par­al­lel. Ba­sic­ally, you have all the spe­cific­a­tions in front of you and make the nom­in­al base design as re­quired. Then it's very easy to ad­opt an al­tern­at­ive high ef­fi­ciency solu­tion that meets all cus­tom­er re­quire­ments. Do­ing this sim­ul­tan­eously ba­sic­ally in our en­gin­eer­ing tools that this gives a very clear way for de­cision mak­ing and cus­tom­iz­ing to the needs and ex­pect­a­tions of cus­tom­ers.

IEN Europe: When some­body asks you about end-of-life re­place­ment versus in­stant re­place­ment and re­cyc­ling of old equip­ment. What is your an­swer from an ef­fi­ciency point of view?
Dav­id Bjer­hag: Yes, we ac­tu­ally did a very ser­i­ous work on this. We kind of knew the an­swer, but we had PhD stu­dents, both from Chalmers Uni­versity of Tech­no­logy in Gothen­burg and from Linköping Uni­versity. Do­ing stud­ies on good prac­tice in ef­fi­ciency. Is it to ex­tend life­time or op­tim­ize ef­fi­ciency? When should you re­place? So, there are in­de­pend­ent stud­ies now done by uni­versity that clearly show that ef­fi­ciency kind of trumps everything.

If you lose on ef­fi­ciency, you should redo, re­place the unit very fast. It's not worth­while keep­ing a unit longer be­cause that's also a LCI per­spect­ive, right? So, there are uni­versity-based stud­ies on that, be­cause we wanted to have this cla­ri­fied.

IEN Europe: Thank you for these in­sights!
 

Al­though the an­cient Greek "nano" means "dwarf", in the nano sec­tor the dwarf would be a gi­ant. In the tech­nic­al realm, "nano" means ten to the power of neg­at­ive nine, or one bil­lionth. In ad­di­tion, parts even smal­ler than this are pos­sible - for ex­ample, the in­tric­ate shapes that come out of the NanoOne 3D print­er from Up­N­ano. To pro­duce these, light particles are fired at the start­ing ma­ter­i­al. This is a pro­cess that plays out over a range of thou­sandths of a mil­li­meter. 

The struc­tures that Up­N­ano pro­duces in the 3D print­er are so small that they are re­cog­niz­able neither with the na­ked eye nor with a strong op­tic­al mi­cro­scope. Only un­der a scan­ning elec­tron mi­cro­scope do the smal­lest prin­ted struc­tures be­come vis­ible. They are a sort of "tiny sphere" or dust particle with a total dia­met­er of just a frac­tion of a mil­li­meter. The bars that make up the con­struct are 100 times thin­ner than a hu­man hair. These struc­tures are used, for ex­ample, in med­ic­al ex­per­i­ments as, among oth­er things, a frame­work for liv­ing cells, or as mi­cro­fil­ters, mi­croneedles or mi­crolenses.

A castle on the tip of a pen­cil

Up­N­ano is a spin-off of the Vi­enna Uni­versity of Tech­no­logy. Be­fore the founders switched to free eco­nomy more than five years ago, they con­duc­ted re­search at the uni­versity in the field of 3D print­ing with high res­ol­u­tion. To demon­strate what is pos­sible, they prin­ted the mod­el of a castle com­plete with mul­tiple levels, ori­els, ledges, arch­ways, two spires and el­eg­ant columns - on the tip of a pen­cil. The columns were just 950 nano­met­ers thick. The print­er, which Up­N­ano has since de­veloped to mar­ket read­i­ness and sells world­wide, goes even a step fur­ther: struc­tures smal­ler than 200 nano­met­ers can be real­ized ho­ri­zont­ally and smal­ler than 550 nano­met­ers ver­tic­ally.

The pro­duc­tion of such mini­atur­ized ob­jects is pos­sible thanks to so-called 2-photon litho­graphy, which is based on a quantum ef­fect between two light particles. They thereby trig­ger the so­lid­i­fic­a­tion of the ma­ter­i­al, res­ult­ing in the form­a­tion of stable chains in the plastic mo­lecules. "To get the de­cis­ive photon pairs across the fin­ish line, we need to fire a massive num­ber of light particles," ex­plains Peter Gruber, co-founder and CTO of Up­N­ano. "This is be­cause we need an enorm­ous photon dens­ity with re­spect to both time and space to bring about the con­trolled poly­mer­iz­a­tion."

An ac­cur­ate laser makes it pos­sible

The laser that sup­plies the photons op­er­ates with ex­tremely short, high-in­tens­ity pulses. Moreover, the meth­od al­lows for high ac­cur­acy, as Peter Gruber ex­plains: "With oth­er light-based 3D-print­ing meth­ods, poly­mer­iz­a­tion is triggered along the en­tire beam path. As a res­ult, pro­duc­tion can only be per­formed in lay­ers. With 2-photon litho­graphy, we can fo­cus them on a tiny point. This point can be moved freely through the ma­ter­i­al by our print­er's high-per­form­ance op­tics. This al­lows us to pro­duce nearly any geo­met­ric struc­ture."

In ad­di­tion to chan­nels and oth­er ele­ments for mi­cro­fluidics, such struc­tures can also be used to cre­ate lenses that are prin­ted on the end of in­di­vidu­al glass fibers. Print­ing can even take place in ex­ist­ing mi­cro­fluid­ic chips to add ad­di­tion­al struc­tures there. A spe­cial ad­di­tion­al mod­ule also en­ables print­ing with bio­ma­ter­i­al, which con­tains liv­ing cells. Poly­mer­iz­a­tion of the three-di­men­sion­al struc­tures tran­spires only at the in­ten­ded loc­a­tions; the cells in the spaces in between re­main in­tact. The con­structs can be formed like a cell cluster in hu­man tis­sue. In such an ar­range­ment, they are used today for phar­ma­ceut­ic­al tests without an­im­al ex­per­i­ments. 

Mi­cro-en­do­scopes and ar­ti­fi­cial in­sem­in­a­tion

The cus­tom­ers of Up­N­ano are, however, gen­er­ally reti­cent to an­swer the ques­tion of ex­actly what they are pro­du­cing with the devices. Many use them un­der strict secrecy. "We are aware of only a few con­crete ap­plic­a­tions, such as in in-vitro fer­til­iz­a­tion, where work is per­formed with in­di­vidu­al egg cells, or for lenses in mi­cro-en­do­scopes," re­ports Peter Gruber." Our cus­tom­ers are mainly in med­ic­al tech­no­logy, the phar­ma­ceut­ic­al in­dustry and in tele­com­mu­nic­a­tion. There are also more and more in­dus­tries that are dis­cov­er­ing the pos­sib­il­it­ies of mini­atur­ized 3D print­ing for their own uses."

The size scale of the ob­jects that can be pro­duced with a NanoOne print­er spans from less than 150 nano­met­ers to more than 40 mil­li­meters. Four lenses with dif­fer­ent res­ol­u­tion en­sure max­im­um flex­ib­il­ity. The through­put of more than 450 cu­bic mil­li­meters per hour is the basis for high pro­ductiv­ity. Pre­ci­sion of the print­ing pro­cess is en­sured not only by the high-qual­ity laser op­tics but also by the pre­cise align­ment of the sub­strate. This is se­cured on a move­able sup­port. 

FAUL­HABER drives in the NanoOne devices

The name "Auto­mat­ic Tilt Cor­rec­tion In­sert" de­scribes the func­tion of this sup­port: It cor­rects the tip­ping that is nearly im­possible to avoid when in­sert­ing the print sub­strate in the print­er. The align­ment of the sub­strate can be changed on three axes (x, y and z) and thereby op­tim­ally po­si­tioned." We achieve a flat­ness in the sub-mi­cro­met­er range," em­phas­izes Peter Gruber. "This en­sures that the pre­ci­sion of the laser op­tics ac­tu­ally finds its way in­to the print ma­ter­i­al. Fur­ther­more, the rel­ev­ant com­pon­ents are de­coupled from the sur­round­ing tech­no­logy and the hous­ing. As a res­ult, the print­er can simply stand on any stable ta­ble."

The mech­an­ic­al force for the pre­cise po­s­i­tion­ing of the sup­port is sup­plied by three pre­cious met­al com­mut­ated DC-gear­mo­tors with in­teg­rated en­coder of the 1512 ... SR IE2-8 series from Faul­haber. The uniquely flat wind­ing tech­no­logy with three flat, self-sup­port­ing cop­per wind­ings en­ables an ex­tremely com­pact design with a dia­met­er of 15 mil­li­meters and a length of just 14.3 mil­li­meters. Thanks to the high-per­form­ance rare earth mag­nets, the mo­tor de­liv­ers an es­pe­cially high drive torque.

In ad­di­tion to the gear­head, an op­tic­al en­coder is also in­teg­rated in the drive. "We se­lec­ted the gear­mo­tors as the op­tim­um solu­tion for our needs," re­calls Peter Gruber. "The sug­ges­tion to se­lect the ver­sion with en­coder came from FAUL­HABER. Align­ment thereby func­tions even more pre­cisely and more smoothly. In re­la­tion to its small di­men­sions, the drive de­liv­ers enorm­ous power. With its high pre­ci­sion, it con­trib­utes to the qual­ity of the print­ing pro­cess of our NanoOne devices at a key point."
 

In in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions, a stable and re­li­able power sup­ply is cru­cial to the avail­ab­il­ity of en­tire sys­tems. AC/DC power sup­plies for DIN rail mount­ing have be­come the in­dustry stand­ard. They power con­trol sys­tems, sensors and com­mu­nic­a­tion units, thereby form­ing the found­a­tion of auto­ma­tion tech­no­logy.

The de­mands placed on these power sup­plies have in­creased sig­ni­fic­antly in re­cent years. More com­pact designs, high­er power dens­it­ies and an ex­ten­ded tem­per­at­ure range are just as much in de­mand as high ef­fi­ciency dur­ing con­tinu­ous op­er­a­tion. At the same time, de­velopers ex­pect easy in­teg­ra­tion in­to ex­ist­ing con­trol cab­in­ets as well as re­li­able op­er­a­tion even un­der de­mand­ing en­vir­on­ment­al con­di­tions.

Op­tim­ised thermal designs

A key con­sid­er­a­tion is space sav­ing. Space in con­trol cab­in­ets is ex­pens­ive and of­ten lim­ited. Mod­ern AC/DC power sup­plies for DIN rails are there­fore char­ac­ter­ised by a slim design, without com­prom­ising on per­form­ance. Op­tim­ised cir­cuit to­po­lo­gies and thermal design en­able high power out­puts to be achieved in a con­fined space.

In ad­di­tion to size, en­ergy ef­fi­ciency plays a key role. Losses in the power sup­ply not only lead to high­er op­er­at­ing costs but also to ad­di­tion­al heat gen­er­a­tion with­in the con­trol cab­in­et. High-qual­ity power sup­plies achieve ef­fi­cien­cies of over 90 per cent, thereby con­trib­ut­ing to an en­ergy-ef­fi­cient over­all sys­tem. At the same time, cool­ing re­quire­ments are re­duced, which fur­ther en­hances sys­tem re­li­ab­il­ity.

Re­li­able and easy to in­teg­rate

An­oth­er key fo­cus is ro­bust­ness. In­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions place high de­mands on elec­tric­al and mech­an­ic­al re­si­li­ence. Power sup­plies must re­li­ably with­stand voltage fluc­tu­ations, tran­si­ents and elec­tro­mag­net­ic in­ter­fer­ence. Ex­ten­ded in­put voltage ranges and in­teg­rated pro­tec­tion func­tions such as over­cur­rent, over­voltage and short-cir­cuit pro­tec­tion en­sure stable op­er­a­tion even un­der dif­fi­cult con­di­tions.

For elec­tric­al en­gin­eers, ease of com­mis­sion­ing is also cru­cial. Clear con­nec­tion con­cepts, eas­ily ac­cess­ible ter­min­als and re­li­able DIN rail mount­ing fa­cil­it­ate in­teg­ra­tion in­to new or ex­ist­ing sys­tems. Ad­di­tion­al func­tions such as DC OK sig­nals or ad­justable out­put voltages aid dia­gnostics and in­crease flex­ib­il­ity in use.

In­ter­na­tion­al ap­provals also play an im­port­ant role, par­tic­u­larly for ma­chinery and sys­tems used world­wide. Cer­ti­fic­a­tions to cur­rent stand­ards en­able trouble-free use in dif­fer­ent mar­kets and re­duce the ef­fort in­volved in the ap­prov­al pro­cess. In this con­text, TRACO POWER of­fers a wide range of AC/DC power sup­plies for DIN rails, spe­cific­ally de­signed to meet the re­quire­ments of in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions. The units com­bine com­pact designs with high ef­fi­ciency and re­li­ab­il­ity, and cov­er a range of power rat­ings. This provides de­velopers and sys­tem in­teg­rat­ors with a flex­ible basis for soph­ist­ic­ated power sup­ply con­cepts in in­dustry.

AC/DC power sup­plies for DIN rails are there­fore far more than mere power sources. They are an in­teg­ral part of mod­ern auto­ma­tion solu­tions and con­trib­ute sig­ni­fic­antly to the ef­fi­ciency and re­li­ab­il­ity of in­dus­tri­al sys­tems.
 

The on­go­ing di­git­al­isa­tion and de­cent­ral­isa­tion of in­dus­tri­al plants is pla­cing new de­mands on the elec­tric­al in­ter­face of mod­ern drives and their con­trol sys­tems. With the Size 15 vari­ant, the HART­ING Tech­no­logy Group of­fers a stand­ard­ised, com­pact and high-per­form­ance cir­cu­lar con­nect­or solu­tion for asyn­chron­ous mo­tors and de­cent­ral­ised con­trol sys­tems.
Size 15 con­nect­ors are primar­ily used in asyn­chron­ous mo­tors where fre­quency con­trol is not re­quired. This elim­in­ates the need for com­plex EMC shield­ing via a met­al hous­ing. HART­ING con­sist­ently opts for ro­bust plastic hous­ings, which re­duce weight, sim­pli­fy in­stall­a­tion and of­fer cost-ef­fect­ive be­ne­fits at the same time. Fur­ther­more, this cir­cu­lar con­nect­or is ideally suited for con­nect­ing mul­tiple devices with low power con­sump­tion in a daisy-chain con­fig­ur­a­tion.

Stand­ard­ised, safe, high-per­form­ance

The Size 15 in­ter­face is in­ter­na­tion­ally stand­ard­ised in ac­cord­ance with IEC 61076-2-115, thereby guar­an­tee­ing cross-man­u­fac­turer com­pat­ib­il­ity and second-source cap­ab­il­ity – a de­cis­ive factor for users in in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion.

The stand­ard de­scribes the three clearly defined con­fig­ur­a­tions: 

• 630 V / 16 A with 3 power con­tacts, earth con­duct­or and two sig­nal con­tacts,
• 48 V / 20 A with 2 power con­tacts, earth con­duct­or and three sig­nal con­tacts,
• 24 V / 20 A as a fur­ther vari­ant for spe­cial ap­plic­a­tions.
   

HART­ING of­fers solu­tions for the 630 V and 48 V vari­ants in its port­fo­lio. De­pend­ing on the ver­sion, this al­lows devices to be con­nec­ted se­curely in a daisy-chain struc­ture up to a total power of 16 kW, or an asyn­chron­ous mo­tor with up to 7.5 kW, ideal for many of the up­com­ing de­cent­ral­ised drive com­pon­ents.

Bay­on­et lock 

To en­sure a se­cure con­nec­tion, Size 15 util­ises a bay­on­et lock throughout. This en­ables a quick, vi­bra­tion-res­ist­ant con­nec­tion and is op­tim­ally tailored to the de­mands of in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ments. 

With Size 15, HART­ING is of­fer­ing, for the first time, a stand­ard­ised al­tern­at­ive to the Han® 3A series, thereby bridging the gap between high-per­form­ance but heavy M23 met­al con­nect­ors and very com­pact M12 power solu­tions. Users be­ne­fit from an in­ter­face that is pre­cisely tailored to the per­form­ance re­quire­ments of mod­ern asyn­chron­ous drives.

DC power sys­tems are ex­per­i­en­cing rap­id growth. The need for ef­fi­cient and sim­pli­fied elec­tric­al pro­tec­tion solu­tions has be­come in­creas­ingly im­port­ant. Ap­plic­a­tions such as en­ergy stor­age, elec­tric vehicle char­ging in­fra­struc­ture, data cen­ters and re­new­able en­ergy sys­tems re­quire op­tim­ized AC/DC per­form­ance and flex­ible in­teg­ra­tion.

At PCIM 2026 Mersen is present­ing its latest gen­er­a­tion of high-per­form­ance fuses. The products of­fer op­tim­ized AC/DC per­form­ance and were spe­cific­ally de­signed for the rap­idly grow­ing DC power sys­tems mar­ket, while main­tain­ing the fast-act­ing per­form­ance of Mersen AC leg­acy fuses. The high-per­form­ance fuses were de­veloped in close col­lab­or­a­tion with lead­ing com­pan­ies in the fields of en­ergy stor­age, elec­tric vehicle char­ging in­fra­struc­ture and data cen­ters.

The high-per­form­ance fuses com­bine the best AC/DC elec­tric­al char­ac­ter­ist­ics in a single com­pact hous­ing. This design not only saves space for equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers and of­fers great flex­ib­il­ity in in­stall­a­tion – it also sig­ni­fic­antly sim­pli­fies their pro­cure­ment pro­cess. Where­as they pre­vi­ously needed two dif­fer­ent fuse types for AC and DC ap­plic­a­tions, only one is now re­quired. The product range cov­ers a very wide range of rated cur­rents, and the fuses can be used as stand­ard AC fuses, aR fuses or fast-act­ing fuses.

De­signed for Power Con­ver­sion and Key Ap­plic­a­tions

De­veloped in close col­lab­or­a­tion with lead­ing com­pan­ies, these high-per­form­ance fuses are fully aligned with real-world ap­plic­a­tion re­quire­ments. The primary ap­plic­a­tion area for Mersen’s new high-per­form­ance fuses is power elec­tron­ics, power con­ver­sion sys­tems like but not lim­ited to in­vert­ers, SST, CS and MCS. These sys­tems con­vert dir­ect cur­rent – e.g., from PV and wind en­ergy plants – in­to grid-com­pat­ible al­tern­at­ing cur­rent. All high-per­form­ance fuses un­der­go rig­or­ous qual­ity test­ing, most of which is con­duc­ted in Mersen’s own UL re­cog­nized test labor­at­ory and ex­tern­al spe­cial­ized in­sti­tutes. The new high-per­form­ance fuses are man­u­fac­tured on fully auto­mated pro­duc­tion lines in ac­cord­ance with the latest tech­nic­al stand­ards (IEC, UL, CCC, RoHS, REACH, WEEE).

Mersen’s latest design was de­veloped with a fo­cus on im­prov­ing qual­ity while stream­lin­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing and strength­en­ing sup­ply chain ef­fi­ciency. Mersen also provides users with a range of data from sim­u­la­tion pro­cesses that demon­strate the fuse’s be­ha­vi­or in a cus­tom­er-spe­cif­ic ap­plic­a­tion. This al­lows the products to be op­tim­ally se­lec­ted to match re­quire­ments of the users.
 

In industry, PCs have become important pillars of automation. In addition to high clock speeds, they require robust performance from their CPUs (Central Processing Units). They must be durable enough to last ten to twenty years, function in ambient temperatures of -40 to +85 °C, and withstand stresses exerted on them by, for instance, vibrations. The quick dissipation of the power losses, which can reach between 35 and 65 W, is therefore of vital importance. CTX Thermal Solutions manufactures heat pipes for cooling CPUs used in industrial PCs. When given the right design, their performance can be optimally exploited in the tightest of installation spaces.

Why heat pipes are in demand for industrial CPUs

Heat pipes are an well-established heat conductor, especially in industry. They dissipate high power losses from the hotspot at a very fast rate. They are low-maintenance and work as a passive cooling solution in a dust-proof closed IPC housing. These properties are derived from their principle of operation. A heat pipe is a closed system consisting of a copper tube holding a cooling medium. Where this medium heats up, evaporative heat is generated, lowering the pressure inside the tube. The pressure gradient causes the steam to flow to the colder part of the heat pipe, where it condenses and releases the heat to a heat sink. The inner capillary structure of the tube transports the liquid back to the CPU against the force of gravity. Working independently, the passive cooling system does not require external water pumps, piping or fans.

Why more pipes do not automatically translate to more power

Heat pipes offer a high degree of design freedom. This makes them ideal for the tight installation spaces commonly found in PCs. More powerful CPUs do not necessarily require additional heat pipes. It is an interplay of several factors which CTX tailors precisely to the available space. The first decisive factor is how much heat a single heat pipe can transport. This is largely determined by their diameter, length, and capillary structure as well as by their design for unhindered heat transport. CTX names the installation position of the heat pipe as the second decisive factor. A vertical arrangement can improve the performance of a heat pipe: If its evaporator is seated below the condenser, it supports the return flow of the operating fluid through gravity. Regardless of this, the crucial factor in minimizing thermal resistance is to achieve the best possible thermal contact between the heat pipe, heat source, and heat sink.

More pipes usually also mean an increase in the number of heat transfers and a rise in thermal resistance. Consequently, such an expansion always requires an adjustment of the heat sink and the routing of the airflow. In this way, evaporation, heat transport, condensation and return flow remain in balance.

CTX takes charge of the application-specific design of heat sinks according to heat dissipation requirements, installation space, and ambient conditions. In a thermal simulation, the manufacturer reviews the performance data and, if necessary, optimizes the cooling performance by tweaking the design or material. Aside from these heat pipes, the manufacturer makes all other standard heat sinks such as extruded profile and liquid-cooled heat sinks. What is more, CTX also develops and manufactures customized cooling solutions.
 

The TDK -Lambda D1SE series of cost-ef­fect­ive DIN-rail mount power sup­plies now of­fers 12, 48, and 72 V out­put mod­els. Ini­tially launched with 120, 240 and 480 W 24 V ver­sions, the series of­fer­ing has now been broadened to bet­ter sup­port the needs of vari­ous ap­plic­a­tions, such as PLCs, sensors, ro­bot­ic arms and se­cur­ity ap­plic­a­tions for the 12 V mod­el. The 48 V out­put op­tion was also de­signed to aid en­gin­eers in the in­dus­tri­al net­work­ing and power over Eth­er­net (PoE) mar­kets, with the 72 V mod­el for DC mo­tors and drives.

Avail­able with AC and DC in­put 

With ef­fi­cien­cies of over 95%, in­tern­al losses are re­duced, lower­ing the tem­per­at­ure of heat sens­it­ive com­pon­ents like elec­tro­lyt­ic ca­pa­cit­ors to en­hance long-term product re­li­ab­il­ity, and lessen en­ergy con­sump­tion. These new mod­els can op­er­ate with­in a wide range of 85 – 264 V_ac, as well as DC in­put ranges of 93 – 300 V. Safety cer­ti­fic­a­tion to the in­ter­na­tion­al stand­ards have been ob­tained for both in­put voltage types, provid­ing a high de­gree of flex­ib­il­ity to the user for op­er­at­ing from an AC source, a DC bus, or a bat­tery.

The D1SE series is equipped with re­li­able push-in wire ter­min­a­tions, short­en­ing in­stall­a­tion times and fa­cil­it­at­ing auto­mated ro­bot­ic in­ser­tion of wir­ing har­nesses. A pro­tect­ive board coat­ing op­tion (A5) has now been made avail­able and in­cludes a DC OK closed con­tact re­lay. Its com­pact size may be­ne­fit en­gin­eers design­ing ap­plic­a­tions such as power­ing con­trol cab­in­ets, ma­chinery, and a wide vari­ety of pro­duc­tion sys­tems. The space sav­ing rugged met­al en­clos­ure has a width of 38 mm for the 120 W mod­els, 44 mm for the 240 W, and 60 mm for the 480 W, al­low­ing ad­di­tion­al com­pon­ents to be fit­ted on the DIN-rail.

Tem­per­at­ure range from -25 to 70 °C

In­put-to-out­put isol­a­tion is 5000 V_dc, in­put-to-ground 3100 V_dc, and out­put-to-ground is 750 V_dc. The D1SE mod­els are con­vec­tion-cooled and rated for op­er­a­tion in -25 to +70 °C am­bi­ent tem­per­at­ures, with de­rat­ing above 55 °C.

The D1SE series is cer­ti­fied to IEC/EN/UL/CSA 61010-1, 61010-2-201, 62368-1 (Ed.3) and IS 13252-1 stand­ards and is CE and UKCA marked to the Low Voltage, EMC and RoHS Dir­ect­ives. It also meets EN 55011-B and CISPR11-B ra­di­ated and con­duc­ted emis­sions with a very large mar­gin com­pared to many in­dus­tri­al power sup­plies. The series com­plies with EN 61000-3-2 (Class A) har­mon­ic cur­rents and IEC/EN 61000-6-2 im­munity stand­ards. The IEC/EN 61000-4-5 asym­met­ric­al surge voltage rat­ing (L-PE) is 4 k Vac.
 

For its new flange en­clos­ures, ROSE Sys­tem­tech­nik ex­clus­ively uses stain­less steel grades 1.4301 and 1.4404. This means that, in ad­di­tion to the stain­less steel Ex en­clos­ures, the stain­less steel in­dus­tri­al en­clos­ures are now also avail­able as stand­ard in the highest ma­ter­i­al qual­ity. Com­pared to pre­vi­ous stain­less steel en­clos­ure series, the new mod­els also of­fer nu­mer­ous fur­ther in­nov­a­tions.

The en­clos­ures can now be eas­ily ex­pan­ded with side-moun­ted flanges or ad­ap­ted to spe­cif­ic in­stall­a­tion re­quire­ments without com­prom­ising the pro­tec­tion rat­ing. Pre­vi­ously, en­clos­ures with dif­fer­ent con­nec­tion con­fig­ur­a­tions re­quired a ded­ic­ated ver­sion for each vari­ant. Now, only a single en­clos­ure mod­el is needed, which can simply be com­bined with the ap­pro­pri­ate flange to meet a wide range of re­quire­ments. 

Op­tim­ised ex­tern­al earth­ing

With the new stain­less steel flange en­clos­ures, ROSE Sys­tem­tech­nik is also in­tro­du­cing a new cap­tive nut tech­no­logy that provides users with max­im­um flex­ib­il­ity. Design en­gin­eers are no longer re­stric­ted to a pre­defined mount­ing grid and can now po­s­i­tion mount­ing points freely. This makes the in­stall­a­tion of elec­tric­al and elec­tron­ic com­pon­ents con­sid­er­ably easi­er than be­fore. Ex­ist­ing ac­cessor­ies from pre­vi­ous stain­less steel series re­main fully com­pat­ible, en­sur­ing that older en­clos­ures can be re­placed seam­lessly. The ex­tern­al earth­ing sys­tem has been op­tim­ised. Weld studs for ring cable lugs are now used, guar­an­tee­ing a se­cure, low-res­ist­ance con­nec­tion. Cus­tom­ers be­ne­fit from max­im­um flex­ib­il­ity here as well, as they can spe­cify the ex­act po­s­i­tion of the studs on the en­clos­ure. With the new stain­less steel flange en­clos­ures, ROSE of­fers ex­tern­al earth­ing as a stand­ard fea­ture for in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions.

Main­ten­ance of the new stain­less steel flange en­clos­ures is even sim­pler than with pre­vi­ous ver­sions. ROSE Sys­tem­tech­nik has re­placed Phil­lips-head screws with high-qual­ity stain­less steel hexagon cov­er screws. These can be loosened ef­fort­lessly even in freez­ing tem­per­at­ures, wet con­di­tions or heavy con­tam­in­a­tion, while also pre­vent­ing screw head dam­age caused by over­tight­en­ing. 

A prac­tic­al new fea­ture of the hinged en­clos­ure ver­sions is the drain­age open­ings on both the up­per and lower sides. These al­low stand­ing wa­ter in­side the door to drain away eas­ily. As a res­ult, in­stall­a­tion in either ori­ent­a­tion is pos­sible without any is­sues.