Regal Rexnord Cor­por­a­tion has joined forces with auto­ma­tion lead­er ABB Ro­bot­ics to sim­pli­fy in­teg­ra­tion of its GoFa™ co­bots in­to 7^th Ax­is Co­bot Trans­fer Units (CTUs) from Thom­son, one of Regal Rexnord’s lead­ing lin­ear mo­tion brands. This col­lab­or­a­tion makes the Thom­son Mo­vo­trak™ CTU the first co­bot 7^th ax­is tech­no­logy that ABB Ro­bot­ics has cer­ti­fied for use in its part­ner eco­sys­tem. 

“Un­til now, any­one want­ing to use a single, plug-and-play ABB co­bot on mul­tiple work­sta­tions faced what could be days of pro­gram­ming and com­mu­nic­a­tions chal­lenges. As part of the ABB Ro­bot­ics part­ner eco­sys­tem, we have pre­con­figured our Mo­vo­trak CTU, en­sur­ing rap­id de­ploy­ment with ABB co­bots right out of the box. In­teg­rat­ors, dis­trib­ut­ors, and end-users can now in­vest more time us­ing the 7^th ax­is to solve pro­ductiv­ity prob­lems than deal­ing with com­plex in­teg­ra­tion de­tails,” said Kev­in Zaba, EVP and Pres­id­ent, Auto­ma­tion & Mo­tion Con­trol seg­ment of Regal Rexnord. 

The Thom­son Mo­vo­trak CTU 7th Axes of­fer an ex­ten­ded op­er­at­ing range of up to 10 meters, flex­ible mount­ing op­tions and col­li­sion de­tec­tion. The Thom­son lin­ear units are in­teg­rated with oth­er Regal Rexnord com­pon­ents, in­clud­ing Bo­ston Gear gear­heads, Huco coup­lings, and Koll­mor­gen mo­tors and soft­ware for a com­plete, high-level as­sembly with one part num­ber. 

“This col­lab­or­a­tion with ABB Ro­bot­ics is a great ex­ample of how our dif­fer­en­ti­ated Regal Rexnord tech­no­lo­gies can be in­teg­rated in­to high-im­pact, cus­tom­er-ready solu­tions,” said Louis Pinkham, CEO of Regal Rexnord. “By com­bin­ing the tech­nic­al ex­pert­ise of our Thom­son, Kollor­gen, Bo­ston Gear, and Huco brands in­to a seam­less, 7^th ax­is sys­tem avail­able for the ABB Ro­bot­ics part­ner eco­sys­tem, we’re mak­ing it easi­er for cus­tom­ers to un­lock great­er pro­ductiv­ity and flex­ib­il­ity in their auto­ma­tion strategies. It also re­flects our on­go­ing com­mit­ment to in­nov­a­tion and de­liv­er­ing value through sys­tem-level think­ing.” 
 

The mar­ket is in­creas­ingly mov­ing to­wards con­tinu­ous line pro­duc­tion. Yet many com­pan­ies still face manu­al chal­lenges in the so-called End-of-Line area – where food products are labeled, in­spec­ted, stacked or pal­let­ized after pack­aging. Grow­ing labor short­ages are in­creas­ing the pres­sure to act. This new part­ner­ship ad­dresses these chal­lenges with a hol­ist­ic solu­tion ap­proach.

Com­ple­ment­ary ex­pert­ise for the en­tire line pro­cess

Each part­ner con­trib­utes its spe­cif­ic know-how to the al­li­ance: Bizerba is re­spons­ible for weigh­ing, la­beling, sli­cing and in­spec­tion tech­no­lo­gies and takes on the role of sys­tem in­teg­rat­or. FA­NUC con­trib­utes cut­ting-edge ro­bot­ics and con­trol tech­no­lo­gies. KIL­IV­A­TIONS brings years of ex­pert­ise in the de­vel­op­ment of ro­bot­ic ap­plic­a­tions and auto­ma­tion solu­tions. Schmalz adds ex­tens­ive know­ledge in grip­ping and va­cu­um tech­no­logy – tailored spe­cific­ally to the re­quire­ments of del­ic­ate food products.

At auto­mat­ica 2025, the four com­pan­ies presen­ted a first mile­stone of their part­ner­ship: a mod­u­lar, fully auto­mated sand­wich sta­tion for hy­gien­ic, con­tact-free hand­ling of fresh food. The sys­tem com­bines pre­cise sli­cing tech­no­logy with state-of-the-art ro­bot­ics, ad­vanced va­cu­um grip­ping sys­tems and high-pre­ci­sion dos­ing – en­abling pin­point pro­duc­tion of snacks “on de­mand”, con­tact­less and ef­fi­cient.

Fu­ture-ready auto­ma­tion

A wide range of projects is already un­der­way – fo­cus­ing on product hand­ling, case load­ing and pal­let­iz­ing in the End-of-Line area of the food in­dustry. Bizerba acts as the cent­ral point of con­tact and in­teg­rat­or of the over­all solu­tion.

Oliv­er Deifel, Dir­ect­or Glob­al Cus­tom­er Solu­tion Cen­ter at Bizerba, em­phas­izes: “This stra­tegic part­ner­ship is a per­fect match and a key ele­ment of our Bizerba strategy to de­liv­er hol­ist­ic solu­tions for the food mar­ket. Our goal is to trans­form the en­tire line pro­cess down­stream of the pack­aging ma­chine in­to con­tinu­ous, scal­able auto­ma­tion con­cepts. As the cent­ral in­teg­rat­or, we com­bine our own port­fo­lio with the spe­cial­ist know­ledge of our part­ners – ef­fi­cient, fu­ture-ready and cus­tom­er-fo­cused.”

The com­bin­a­tion of deep in­dustry know­ledge, tech­no­lo­gic­al ex­cel­lence and many years of ex­per­i­ence across in­dus­tries makes this new al­li­ance a power­ful driver for trans­form­a­tion in food pro­cessing.

Siemens AG closed its ac­quis­i­tion of ebm-papst's in­dus­tri­al drive tech­no­logy busi­ness. In the fu­ture, it will be mar­keted us­ing the name "Mechat­ron­ic Sys­tems" at Siemens. The busi­ness has about 650 em­ploy­ees and its port­fo­lio in­cludes in­tel­li­gent, in­teg­rated mechat­ron­ic sys­tems in the ex­tra-low voltage pro­tec­tion range, in­nov­at­ive driv­ing sys­tems used in free-mov­ing, driver­less trans­port sys­tems, and oth­er ap­plic­a­tions. This ac­quis­i­tion com­ple­ments the Siemens Xcel­er­at­or port­fo­lio, strength­en­ing Siemens' po­s­i­tion as a lead­ing pro­vider of flex­ible man­u­fac­tur­ing auto­ma­tion solu­tions. In­teg­rat­ing the new port­fo­lio in­to the ex­ist­ing auto­ma­tion port­fo­lio and lever­aging Siemens' glob­al sales net­work will open up new mar­kets and sig­ni­fic­ant busi­ness po­ten­tial in the field of in­tel­li­gent, bat­tery-powered drive and ro­bot solu­tions.

“The new port­fo­lio ele­ments sig­ni­fic­antly ex­pand and en­hance our of­fer­ings to cus­tom­ers who want to auto­mate and di­git­al­ize their pro­duc­tion pro­cesses in smart factor­ies. Our in­teg­rated mechat­ron­ic drive sys­tems of­fer in­creased flex­ib­il­ity, pro­ductiv­ity and ef­fi­ciency in the grow­ing glob­al mar­ket for con­vey­or and autonom­ous trans­port sys­tems, in­clud­ing mo­bile ro­bots, driver­less trans­port sys­tems and shuttles," ex­plains Achim Peltz, CEO of the Mo­tion Con­trol Busi­ness Unit at Siemens Di­git­al In­dus­tries. Their seam­less com­pat­ib­il­ity with Simat­ic con­trol­lers and the soft­ware-based safety solu­tion Safe Ve­lo­city for mo­bile ro­bot­ics of­fer ex­tra ad­vant­ages. 

The ex­pan­ded port­fo­lio in­cludes two main vari­ants: the Simot­ics E-1EE1 (brush­less in­tern­al ro­tors), which are par­tic­u­larly suit­able for bat­tery-powered con­vey­ing, stor­age and sort­ing sys­tems; and the Simot­ics E-1EV1 (brush­less out­run­ners), which im­press with their high ef­fi­ciency and com­pact design in in­t­ra­lo­gist­ics ap­plic­a­tions. The port­fo­lio is avail­able in 24 V and 48 V ver­sions. The port­fo­lio also of­fers trans­mis­sion solu­tions, which are only avail­able in con­junc­tion with Simot­ics E mo­tors. A not­able in­nov­a­tion is the Simot­ics E Ar­goDrive driver steer­ing sys­tem, which was spe­cially de­veloped to meet the grow­ing de­mands of in­t­ra­lo­gist­ics and auto­mated pro­duc­tion. Avail­able in Light, Stand­ard and Heavy vari­ants, it en­ables the safe and pre­cise om­ni­direc­tion­al con­trol of auto­mated guided vehicles, even when car­ry­ing heavy loads.

Loc­a­tions in Ger­many and Ro­mania

These sys­tems sup­port Siemens' sus­tain­ab­il­ity goals by provid­ing en­ergy-ef­fi­cient solu­tions and help­ing cre­ate flex­ible, scal­able and se­cure di­git­al factor­ies. The newly in­teg­rated busi­ness com­prises three loc­a­tions: two in Ger­many (St. Geor­gen and Lauf an der Peg­nitz) and one in Ro­mania (Oradea).

The ebm-papst Group first an­nounced its in­ten­tion to sell its In­dus­tri­al Drive Tech­no­logy (IDT) di­vi­sion to Siemens AG in March of 2024, and both parties signed an agree­ment to this ef­fect. The sale to Siemens AG has now been com­pleted, giv­ing IDT ac­cess to the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket through Siemens' glob­al Sales or­gan­iz­a­tion. All of the di­vi­sion's em­ploy­ees have been taken on by Siemens. The parties in­volved have agreed to not dis­close the price.
 

Kon­tron and con­g­atec GmbH an­nounced the agree­ment for con­g­atec to be­come 96% share­hold­er of Kon­tron's sub­si­di­ary JUMP­tec by means of a cap­it­al in­crease. The sign­ing and clos­ing took place on Ju­ly 1, 2025. The re­gis­tra­tion un­der com­mer­cial law will fol­low shortly. con­g­atec is a port­fo­lio com­pany of DBAG (Deutsche Beteili­gungs AG) Fund VIII.

Through the in­vest­ment, con­g­atec holds 96% of JUMP­tec and 100% of the sub­si­di­ar­ies Kon­tron Amer­ica Mod­ules LLC, USA and Kon­tron Asia Em­bed­ded Design Sdn Bhd, Malay­sia. The trans­ac­tions will pre­sum­ably lead to cash in­flows of more than EUR 100 mil­lion at Kon­tron. Fur­ther­more, EBITDA in Q2 2025 will in­crease by EUR 50-70 mil­lion. In the event of DBAG's exit from con­g­atec, Kon­tron will be­ne­fit from ad­di­tion­al per­form­ance-re­lated pro­ceeds. The cor­res­pond­ingly im­proved EBITDA guid­ance and an ad­just­ment of the rev­en­ue ex­pect­a­tion for the full year 2025 will be avail­able when the res­ults for the second quarter 2025 are pub­lished. JUMP­tec gen­er­ated sales of around EUR 90 mil­lion in 2024.

"The co­oper­a­tion bundles tech­no­lo­gic­al ex­pert­ise and se­cures us ac­cess to high-per­form­ance mod­ules in the long term," says Hannes Nieder­haus­er, CEO of Kon­tron AG. "At the same time, we are strength­en­ing our pro­duc­tion and ex­pand­ing our range of em­bed­ded and sys­tem solu­tions."

Kon­tron has been pro­du­cing COMs for con­g­atec at in­ter­na­tion­al loc­a­tions since May 2025. Glob­al man­u­fac­tur­ing brings ad­vant­ages in terms of costs, de­liv­ery cap­ab­il­ity and the re­sponse to geo­pol­it­ic­al chal­lenges such as tar­iffs or loc­al mar­ket re­quire­ments.
 

Cracks, break­age and erosion in ro­tor blades are com­mon causes of fail­ure in wind tur­bines. Off­shore wind farms are at spe­cial risk, as they are ex­posed to ex­cep­tion­ally strong winds, rain and oth­er severe weath­er con­di­tions at sea. Be­cause these fa­cil­it­ies are hard to ac­cess, in­spec­tions are costly and time-con­sum­ing, which is why ro­tor blades are some­times simply re­placed when dam­age is merely sus­pec­ted. The costs can run to well over 200,000 euros per blade per in­cid­ent.

Struc­ture-borne sound sensors de­tect dam­age

A di­vi­sion of Fraunhofer IIS is work­ing with Fraunhofer IWES on a solu­tion: “Our goal is to use acous­tic emis­sion sensors to re­li­ably mon­it­or dam­age to ro­tor blades re­motely, thereby help­ing to en­sure that wind tur­bines are avail­able and do not fail,” says Björn Zeug­mann, group man­ager at Fraunhofer IIS in the area of ana­log in­teg­rated cir­cuit design, de­scrib­ing the project’s ob­ject­ives.

To that end, he and his col­leagues worked to­geth­er to de­vel­op a spe­cial chip used in the sensors. The sensors, which are stuck to the in­di­vidu­al ro­tor blades from in­side, ab­sorb sound waves trav­el­ing through the struc­ture of the blades. One chal­lenge is that un­like with a steel beam, for ex­ample, the ma­ter­i­al is not ho­mo­gen­eous. In­stead, ro­tor blades con­sist of dif­fer­ent lay­ers. The newly de­veloped chip cap­tures sig­nals known as sur­face waves, which are cre­ated in the event of dam­age such as a crack. It then trans­mits these sig­nals, for ex­ample via mo­bile com­mu­nic­a­tions.

What makes this tech­nique spe­cial is that un­like con­ven­tion­al meas­ure­ment sys­tems such as radar sys­tems or drones that col­lect and trans­mit all the raw data, the Dresden-based re­search­ers’ new chip trans­fers only an­om­al­ous in­form­a­tion: “We use an acous­tic sys­tem that de­tects dam­age based on the sounds it makes, so it can tell the dif­fer­ence between a crack that is form­ing in­side the ro­tor blade and a break, for ex­ample,” Zeug­mann ex­plains. Fraunhofer IWES de­veloped this acous­tic solu­tion in a pre­vi­ous project. Ex­tract­ing char­ac­ter­ist­ic fea­tures makes it pos­sible to sig­ni­fic­antly re­duce the data volume so it can be trans­mit­ted via a mo­bile net­work in the first place. “Our chip is al­ways listen­ing, which means ideally it can clas­si­fy and trans­mit in­form­a­tion on po­ten­tial dam­age from in­side the ro­tor blade it­self.”

Re­du­cing un­ne­ces­sary ser­vice mis­sions

Go­ing for­ward, this should make it pos­sible to de­term­ine, first, wheth­er dam­age has in fact oc­curred at all and the tur­bine needs to be shut down in the worst case. Second, it will also help re­duce the num­ber of un­ne­ces­sary ser­vice mis­sions to hard-to-reach off­shore wind farms and op­tim­ize ser­vice be­cause dam­age can be mon­itored over a longer peri­od. If the dam­age gets worse and emits noise, the sound is de­tec­ted, so tech­ni­cians can per­form a tar­geted in­spec­tion and re­pair the is­sue as needed.

Com­pared to ex­ist­ing meas­ure­ment meth­ods, the new solu­tion is smal­ler and more en­ergy-ef­fi­cient and uses sig­ni­fic­antly less data since it trans­mits smal­ler data pack­ages. This means there is also no need for a broad­band in­ter­net con­nec­tion to trans­mit rel­ev­ant in­form­a­tion from the wind farms to the main­land.

De­vel­op­ment of light­ning strike de­tec­tion

In two pri­or projects, Fraunhofer IIS and Fraunhofer IWES already worked to­geth­er to de­vel­op an ini­tial pro­to­type of the chip that can be used to de­tect dam­age. The suc­cessor project, now in pro­gress, was launched on June 1. In the project, the re­search­ers are plan­ning to ex­pand the over­all sys­tem so it can also de­tect light­ning strikes – and the po­ten­tial con­sequences – down the road. This has not been pos­sible thus far, but es­pe­cially for off­shore wind farms, this ad­di­tion­al in­form­a­tion is cru­cial.

Zeug­mann is de­lighted at how far the new tech­no­logy has come: “I’m fas­cin­ated by work­ing in a field of the fu­ture like the en­ergy trans­ition and cre­at­ing value for so­ci­ety that way.”

Code­Wrights was foun­ded in 2002 as a joint ven­ture between En­dress+Haus­er and Pep­perl+Fuchs and em­ploys nearly 50 people. As a ser­vice pro­vider, the com­pany de­vel­ops cus­tom­ized soft­ware solu­tions for pro­viders of meas­ure­ment and auto­ma­tion tech­no­logy, for ex­ample apps and cloud ap­plic­a­tions, soft­ware for in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion and em­bed­ded soft­ware for devices. This has con­trib­uted to Code­Wrights’ prof­it­able growth and its repu­ta­tion as a trus­ted soft­ware part­ner.

Pro­fes­sion­al team and strong busi­ness mod­el

“We are ex­cited to as­sume full own­er­ship of Code­Wrights. At the same time, we would like to thank Pep­perl+Fuchs for more than 20 years of con­struct­ive part­ner­ship,” says Dr Rolf Birk­hofer, man­aging dir­ect­or of En­dress+Haus­er Di­git­al Solu­tions, the Group’s product cen­ter for the In­dus­tri­al In­ter­net of Things (II­oT). “We be­lieve strongly in the ex­pert­ise of the team and the strength of the busi­ness mod­el. To­geth­er, we look for­ward to driv­ing fur­ther growth and suc­cess.”

“We look back on dec­ades of suc­cess­ful col­lab­or­a­tion built on mu­tu­al trust and re­spect, for which we would like to ex­press our genu­ine ap­pre­ci­ation. We are con­fid­ent that, with En­dress+Haus­er as the sole own­er, Code­Wrights is ideally po­si­tioned to drive its stra­tegic de­vel­op­ment and real­ize its full po­ten­tial,” says Lutz Liebers, COO for Pro­cess Auto­ma­tion at Pep­perl+Fuchs.

No changes for cus­tom­ers

“By trans­fer­ring the shares, we are cre­at­ing a clear­er own­er­ship struc­ture and strength­en­ing our com­pany’s stra­tegic abil­ity to act. This de­cision en­ables faster co­ordin­a­tion and provides new im­petus for our shared growth,” adds Thomas Debes, man­aging Dir­ect­or Code­Wrights GmbH. He em­phas­izes that the ac­quis­i­tion will have no im­pact on the ser­vice pro­vider’s day-to-day op­er­a­tions. “Code­Wrights will con­tin­ue to serve all cus­tom­ers with the same com­mit­ment and main­tain its es­tab­lished ser­vice port­fo­lio. Em­ploy­ees at both Code­Wrights and En­dress+Haus­er can ex­pect con­tinu­ity in their work and col­lab­or­a­tion.”
 

Today’s auto­mot­ive man­u­fac­tur­ers face in­creas­ing pres­sure to in­nov­ate rap­idly while op­tim­iz­ing their de­vel­op­ment pro­cesses and ma­ter­i­al us­age, mak­ing ef­fi­cient pro­duc­tion es­sen­tial for main­tain­ing an edge in a highly com­pet­it­ive mar­ket. In this con­text, Ford Mex­ico, headquartered in Mex­ico City, saw the need to stream­line its stamp­ing pro­cess, and – be­ing a long-time cus­tom­er – turned to the Altair team to solve this chal­lenge. 

Sheet met­al form­ing in the auto­mot­ive in­dustry 

Sheet met­al stamp­ing is fun­da­ment­al to the auto­mot­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing in­dustry. A wide range of dif­fer­ent tool, die, and pro­cess com­bin­a­tions are em­ployed to cre­ate an equally di­verse ar­ray of com­pon­ents. Tra­di­tion­ally, de­term­in­ing the op­tim­al stamp­ing pro­cess for a spe­cif­ic part design has been a time-con­sum­ing and la­bour-in­tens­ive task, heav­ily de­pend­ent on the stamp­ing en­gin­eer’s ex­pert­ise and ex­per­i­ence. To ad­dress this is­sue, Ford Mex­ico began doc­u­ment­ing suc­cess­ful met­al stamp­ing pro­duc­tion runs over a 5-year peri­od. Man­age­ment’s goal was to cap­ture in-house do­main know­ledge and best-prac­tices to ex­plore ways to speed the se­lec­tion of the best stamp­ing pro­cess for fu­ture pro­duc­tion runs to en­able busi­ness be­ne­fits in­clud­ing in­creased plant ef­fi­ciency and part qual­ity, re­duc­tion of scrap ma­ter­i­al, and the abil­ity to rap­idly train new per­son­nel.

Find­ing the right pro­cess

In many pro­duc­tion fa­cil­it­ies, there are mul­tiple sheet met­al stamp­ing pro­cesses avail­able to form nes­ted and in­di­vidu­al parts, in­clud­ing pro­gress­ive, trans­fer, and tan­dem press lines. For a spe­cif­ic part design, nu­mer­ous factors come in­to play to identi­fy the op­tim­al or most ef­fi­cient stamp­ing pro­cess, such as the ma­ter­i­al type, thick­ness, part width, and de­sired sur­face fin­ish.

The suc­cess or fail­ure in se­lect­ing the right pro­cess de­pends sig­ni­fic­antly on the ex­per­i­ence and ex­pert­ise of the man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cess en­gin­eer. However, in­creas­ing design com­plex­ity, non-con­ven­tion­al ma­ter­i­al types, and a mul­ti­tude of pro­cess com­bin­a­tions can pose chal­lenges even for the most seasoned pro­cess en­gin­eers, ne­ces­sit­at­ing a la­bour and ma­ter­i­al-in­tens­ive tri­al-and-er­ror prove-out pro­cess.

Cut­ting ma­ter­i­al waste 

Ma­ter­i­al util­iz­a­tion is a par­tic­u­larly crit­ic­al bench­mark. Most auto­mot­ive plants ex­pect around 60% ma­ter­i­al util­iz­a­tion in their stamp­ing mills while the re­main­ing 40% is wasted. Ford aimed to im­prove these met­rics while also im­prov­ing the ac­cur­acy of se­lect­ing the op­tim­al stamp­ing pro­cess on the first at­tempt and in­creas­ing First Time Through (FTT) rates.

To achieve these goals, Ford Mex­ico star­ted doc­u­ment­ing and ac­cu­mu­lat­ing a valu­able as­set: large amounts of clean data as­so­ci­ated with their suc­cess­ful pro­duc­tion runs.

Span­ning a 5-year peri­od, pro­cess en­gin­eers re­cor­ded suc­cess­ful stamp­ing pro­cesses for thou­sands of parts. Cap­tured in this his­tor­ic­al data were valu­able in­sights but the ques­tion now was how they could use this in­form­a­tion to help auto­mate and guide the se­lec­tion of best stamp­ing pro­cess for a giv­en part design.

Hand­ling the data with Altair 

First learn­ing of Altair® Know­ledge Stu­dio® through an Altair tech­no­logy brief­ing, Ford Mex­ico ap­proached Altair to ex­plore the pos­sib­il­ity of ap­ply­ing Altair’s ma­chine learn­ing and pre­dict­ive ana­lyt­ics solu­tion to sup­port their busi­ness ob­ject­ives.

Lever­aging the data Ford col­lec­ted for over 3,000 stamp­ing pro­cesses iden­ti­fied as be­ing rep­res­ent­at­ive of fu­ture re­quire­ments, Ford’s stamp­ing do­main ex­perts and Altair’s solu­tion ar­chi­tects col­lab­or­ated to de­vel­op an ac­cur­ate, re­li­able ma­chine learn­ing mod­el with Know­ledge Stu­dio.

Know­ledge Stu­dio of­fers 15 dif­fer­ent ma­chine learn­ing mod­els al­low­ing users to ex­plore, se­lect and train the mod­el that best fits their data. Us­ing sub­sets of the data, the team ran a series of tests to de­term­ine which was most ef­fect­ive. With an ac­cur­acy rate of over 90%, the de­cision tree mod­el pro­duced the most con­sist­ent res­ults. In the pro­cess, a sur­pris­ing – and valu­able – dis­cov­ery was made. In terms of se­lect­ing the op­tim­al stamp­ing pro­cess, the most im­port­ant factors are the over­all di­men­sions and thick­ness of the fin­ished part.

In­di­vidu­ally, these factors are in­suf­fi­cient for mak­ing a fi­nal de­cision. However, when com­bined with all oth­er data points, Know­ledge Stu­dio’s ma­chine learn­ing al­gorithm provided Ford with res­ults that are nearly 100% ac­cur­ate.

Im­proved pro­cesses and train­ing

The ma­chine learn­ing pre­dict­ive cap­ab­il­it­ies of Know­ledge Stu dio demon­strated high ac­cur­acy and ef­fect­ively auto­mated much of the stamp­ing pro­cess se­lec­tion. By min­im­iz­ing manu­al tri­al-and er­ror pro­cess val­id­a­tions and re­work, more time was avail­able for stamp­ing pro­cess en­gin­eers to ad­dress the most dif­fi­cult and com­plex part designs fur­ther en­han­cing pro­duc­tion ef­fi­ciency and busi­ness value. 

Over­all, pro­jec­ted through­put in­creased threefold, while im­prove­ments in FTT rates led to re­duced re­work time – all ac­com­plished without the need for ad­di­tion­al re­sources. 

Ad­di­tion­ally, the Know­ledge Stu­dio ma­chine learn­ing mod­el suc­cess­fully cap­tured the com­pany's in-house do­main know­ledge. This sup­por­ted a faster learn­ing curve for train­ing new per­son­nel, en­sur­ing that valu­able ex­pert­ise was ef­fi­ciently passed on to new em­ploy­ees. By us­ing this tech­no­logy, the com­pany has en­hanced its train­ing pro­cesses and main­tained a know­ledge­able work­force.
 

Net­work spe­cial­ist Wiese­mann & The­is presents the new Net­work Ex­tender SPE. It en­ables the trans­mis­sion of Eth­er­net data over dis­tances of up to 1 km and more, based on the new Single Pair Eth­er­net (SPE) tech­no­logy. The con­vert­er set can be used to con­nect any Eth­er­net devices over long dis­tances. The con­nec­tion can be im­ple­men­ted us­ing any two-con­duct­or cable, with max­im­um length de­pend­ing on the cable used. SPE can bridge dis­tances of up to 1000m, with two ex­tender sets even fur­ther.

PoE-sup­ply

The Net­work Ex­tender SPE is de­signed for in­dus­tri­al use and sup­ports ap­plic­a­tions in areas such as build­ing auto­ma­tion, man­u­fac­tur­ing and traffic en­gin­eer­ing. Thanks to the Power-over-Eth­er­net (PoE) sup­ply, the device al­lows both data trans­mis­sion and power sup­ply via a single cable. Com­mis­sion­ing is quick and easy via Plug & Play and without the need for IP con­fig­ur­a­tion. The device fea­tures high im­munity to in­ter­fer­ence and com­plies with the ap­plic­able stand­ards for in­dus­tri­al use.

Re­search from Ar­imo shows the av­er­age plant loses 15 hours weekly to down­time, with pro­duc­tion lines fa­cing ap­prox­im­ately 20,000 in­ter­rup­tions an­nu­ally. Ac­cord­ing to Re­silinc, man­u­fac­tur­ing dis­rup­tions in­creased by 30% in the first half of 2024 com­pared to last year, with fact­ory-spe­cif­ic is­sues rising by 40%.

High­er trans­port costs and work­er short­ages have amp­li­fied the im­pact of each stop­page. In this en­vir­on­ment, pre­dict­ing main­ten­ance needs gives com­pan­ies a sig­ni­fic­ant ad­vant­age. Mainly due to the early in­dic­a­tion of a fault, al­low­ing it to be fixed dur­ing the next main­ten­ance peri­od, which means longer ma­chine up­time.

AI-Main­ten­ance In Fig­ures

"When we can spot equip­ment fail­ures weeks be­fore they hap­pen, the whole sup­ply chain be­ne­fits," ex­plains Daniel Sper­lich, Stra­tegic Product Man­ager Con­trol­lers at Mit­subishi Elec­tric Europe. "We can or­der spare parts for re­pair that can be stored un­til the next planned main­ten­ance phase. And, we al­low the pro­duc­tion line to con­tinu­ously run, without any in­ter­rup­tions - in­clud­ing those caused by a lack of spare parts when these are needed ‘here and now’. " As Rafi Ezra, Man­aging Part­ner US In­dus­tri­al Mar­ket at IBM Ser­vices states: "AI-powered main­ten­ance solu­tions can cut down­time by up to 50%, re­duce break­downs by 70%, and lower over­all costs by 25%."

In­dustry Re­sponse to The Needs

Mit­subishi Elec­tric has de­veloped sev­er­al pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance sys­tems. Their MELFA FR series ro­bots with Smart Plus cards track per­form­ance and identi­fy po­ten­tial is­sues early. The com­pany's MELSERVO-J5 servo amp­li­fi­ers use AI to de­tect wear in crit­ic­al mech­an­ic­al parts by ana­lys­ing vi­bra­tion pat­terns, ten­sion changes or back­lash. Ad­di­tion­ally, the FR-E800 Series in­vert­ers fea­ture Cor­ro­sion Alert Sys­tem and Life Dia­gnostics Func­tion to mon­it­or com­pon­ent con­di­tions. "Today, im­ple­ment­ing pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance tools is no longer just an ad­vant­age but a ne­ces­sity for com­pan­ies that want to stay com­pet­it­ive," em­phas­ises Daniel Sper­lich, Stra­tegic Product Man­ager Con­trol­lers from Mit­subishi Elec­tric. "Our solu­tions help man­u­fac­tur­ers ad­dress prob­lems be­fore they af­fect their pro­duc­tion lines. We ‘put in­tel­li­gence’ where it is re­quired most, dir­ectly in­to our equip­ment, close to the mech­an­ics."

Real-World Im­pact

At Mit­subishi HiTec Pa­per Europe GmbH, a mon­it­or­ing sys­tem for cool­ing fans in a pa­per ma­chine paid for it­self in just one hour of pro­duc­tion time. With daily pro­duc­tion ex­ceed­ing 300,000 kg, pre­vent­ing even brief stop­pages brings sig­ni­fic­ant fin­an­cial be­ne­fits. "Sup­ply chain re­li­ab­il­ity starts on the fact­ory floor," says Daniel Sper­lich. "When a ma­chine can self-dia­gnose be­fore break­ing down, it pre­vents the chain re­ac­tion of missed de­liv­er­ies that can dis­rupt down­stream op­er­a­tions."

The Pre­dict­ive Fu­ture

The glob­al pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance mar­ket, val­ued at $7.85 bil­lion in 2022, is ex­pec­ted to grow at 29.5% yearly through 2030 (ht­tps://www.grand­viewre­search.com/in­dustry-ana­lys­is/pre­dict­ive-main­ten­ance-mar­ket) . “There is grow­ing in­terest in im­ple­ment­ing new main­ten­ance sys­tems step by step to op­tim­ise pro­ductiv­ity. The idea here is that im­prove­ments can start at the ma­chine level as well as the whole line or fact­ory level so that auto­ma­tion is per­fectly tailored to meet the spe­cif­ic needs of a par­tic­u­lar pro­duc­tion fa­cil­ity” - adds Daniel Sper­lich. “In this way, the re­turn on in­vest­ment is also much easi­er to cal­cu­late and fully un­der­stand. At Mit­subishi Elec­tric we call it the Smart Man­u­fac­tur­ing Ka­izen Level (SMKL) ap­proach”.

The dy­nam­ic growth of the pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance mar­ket re­flects the in­creas­ing need of man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pan­ies to shift from re­act­ive to pro­act­ive strategies, en­han­cing per­form­ance whilst sta­bil­ising sup­ply chains in un­cer­tain times. A key driver is the abil­ity to im­ple­ment these solu­tions in a scal­able man­ner – from in­di­vidu­al devices to en­tire pro­duc­tion fa­cil­it­ies – without re­quir­ing sig­ni­fic­ant ini­tial cap­it­al in­vest­ment and with clear and easy ROI cal­cu­la­tion.

Nor­we­gi­an deep-tech star­tup Son­air is present­ing its safety-cer­ti­fied 3D ul­tra­sound sensor ADAR to im­prove work­place safety in en­vir­on­ments shared by hu­mans and ro­bots. ADAR en­ables full 360-de­gree 3D obstacle de­tec­tion around autonom­ous mo­bile ro­bots (AM­Rs). AMR man­u­fac­tur­ers can use it to build safer and more af­ford­able autonom­ous ro­bots at sig­ni­fic­antly lower costs than with cur­rent sensor pack­ages. Son­air’s pat­en­ted ADAR (Acous­tic De­tec­tion and Ran­ging) tech­no­logy de­tects people and ob­jects in 3D. A single ADAR sensor provides a com­plete field of view of 180 x 180 de­grees and a de­tec­tion range of five meters for the ro­bot’s safety func­tions — like a vir­tu­al pro­tect­ive shield.

ADAR is de­veloped ac­cord­ing to ISO 13849:2023 Per­form­ance Level d / SIL2. Son­air aims to achieve full safety cer­ti­fic­a­tion by the end of 2025.

Sensor tech­no­logy val­id­ated

More than 20 glob­al com­pan­ies — in­clud­ing AMR man­u­fac­tur­ers, in­dus­tri­al firms, auto­mot­ive sup­pli­ers, and com­pan­ies in health­care and clean­ing — have already val­id­ated the ef­fect­ive­ness of the ADAR sensor through an Early Ac­cess Pro­gram launched in sum­mer 2024.

Com­mer­cial or­ders and con­firm­a­tions are already in place. For ex­ample, Ja­pan’s FUJI COR­POR­A­TION has se­lec­ted ADAR for a fu­ture line of autonom­ous mo­bile ro­bots. 
“Son­air com­bines rap­id de­vel­op­ment cap­ab­il­it­ies with a flex­ible mind­set,” says Koji Kawagu­chi, Gen­er­al Man­ager of the In­nov­a­tion Pro­mo­tion De­part­ment at FUJI COR­POR­A­TION. “Thanks to strong col­lab­or­a­tion and ex­tens­ive test­ing, we were able to con­firm the sensor’s high suit­ab­il­ity for autonom­ous mo­bile ro­bots.”

What is ADAR?

Acous­tic De­tec­tion and Ran­ging (ADAR), a pat­en­ted in­nov­a­tion by Son­air, rep­res­ents a new cat­egory of 3D depth sensors. It en­ables autonom­ous ro­bots to achieve om­ni­direc­tion­al depth per­cep­tion, al­low­ing them to “hear” their sur­round­ings in real time us­ing air­borne sound waves to in­ter­pret spa­tial in­form­a­tion. “ADAR is an ad­vanced plug-and-play sens­ing tech­no­logy that sup­ports com­pli­ance with safety stand­ards. Thanks to its com­pact size and low power and com­pute re­quire­ments, it can be eas­ily in­teg­rated in­to a com­bined sensor pack­age,” ex­plains Knut Sand­ven, Son­air CEO.”
 

In the digital transformation, data is no longer just something to be observed; it is the most valuable asset for making decisions. Designed to optimise and streamline your production processes, Monitora by Siskon enables manufacturers to lead the digital transformation by making every stage of production traceable, analysable and manageable. By collecting real-time data from industrial machines and processes, Monitora enables businesses to instantly monitor production performance, detect deviations and identify areas for improvement. Its user-friendly interface and flexible architecture transform field data into actionable insights, supporting fast and effective decision-making.

Support for management and shop floor operators

Real-time data collection enables the tracking of all machines, stations and processes on the production line. Direct integration with PLCs and control systems from various brands is supported. Time- and event-based data records enable root cause analysis and performance comparisons, allowing recurring issues to be eliminated quickly. Trend analysis of process data can be used to optimise and proactively shape maintenance plans and quality strategies. Monitora seamlessly integrates with existing systems, eliminating the need for additional investments or lengthy implementation processes. Based on open, secure, and standards-compliant communication via OPC UA, the solution offers a web-based, multilingual user interface with live monitoring dashboards, as well as role-based user management and authorisation. Alarm tracking and management supports an email and SMS notification system. The robust analytical foundation, flexible integration capabilities and streamlined design deliver value to management and shop floor operators alike.
 

With con­ven­tion­al main­ten­ance strategies, gen­er­ous buf­fers are un­avoid­able. It is bet­ter to re­place a bear­ing three months too early than one hour too late. Nev­er­the­less, there is no guar­an­tee that a crit­ic­al ele­ment will not fail. Min­im­al as­sembly er­rors and un­ex­pec­ted im­pacts from ex­tern­al mech­an­ic­al forces can trig­ger what you wanted to avoid at all costs: un­planned down­time and its costly con­sequences.

Sensors for Real-Time Mon­it­or­ing

In­tel­li­gent, net­worked sensor sys­tems can be used to mon­it­or plant com­pon­ents that re­quire main­ten­ance in real time. For ex­ample, vi­bra­tion sensors can de­tect vi­bra­tion pat­terns that change un­der the in­flu­ence of wear, in­creas­ing con­tam­in­a­tion, and oth­er in­flu­ences. The eval­u­ation of the sensor data provides a de­tailed and up-to-date pic­ture of the ac­tu­al con­di­tion, in­clud­ing a data-based cal­cu­la­tion of the ex­pec­ted re­main­ing ser­vice life. This not only en­ables pro­act­ive main­ten­ance, but also pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance.

In ad­di­tion to the vi­bra­tion pat­terns of shafts and bear­ings, many oth­er para­met­ers can be mon­itored us­ing ap­pro­pri­ate sensors. Tem­per­at­ure val­ues and curves can also in­dic­ate mech­an­ic­al changes; changes in pres­sure val­ues al­low early de­tec­tion of leaks and seal­ing prob­lems; flow meas­ure­ment, in com­bin­a­tion with oth­er data, can provide in­form­a­tion about the con­di­tion of pumps, valves, and pip­ing sys­tems.

Di­git­al Twin for Pre­cise Main­ten­ance

The de­cis­ive factor now is the in­tel­li­gent com­bin­a­tion and eval­u­ation of all rel­ev­ant data. A di­git­al twin makes this step par­tic­u­larly ef­fi­cient, as it provides a vir­tu­al rep­res­ent­a­tion of the phys­ic­al sys­tem in real time and with a high level of de­tail. With tar­geted im­ple­ment­a­tion, it be­comes the cent­ral basis for pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance. It is there­fore of­ten in­cor­por­ated in­to new sys­tems from the out­set. However, if you also want to take ad­vant­age of its be­ne­fits in ex­ist­ing sys­tems, there is no way around ret­ro­fit­ting.

The prin­ciple of "nev­er change a run­ning sys­tem" is a sum of fin­an­cial, tech­nic­al, and psy­cho­lo­gic­al factors. All three are taken in­to ac­count in the Starter Kit concept from Bosch Di­git­al Twin In­dus­tries and Pep­perl+Fuchs. Its aim is to make the in­teg­ra­tion of a di­git­al twin as simple and cost-ef­fect­ive as pos­sible, in­clud­ing in ex­ist­ing sys­tems. The user not only re­ceives a com­plete pack­age con­cep­tu­ally, but also phys­ic­ally: In a com­pact card­board box, they will find a power­ful 12 kHz vi­bra­tion sensor that per­forms con­di­tion mon­it­or­ing on a mov­ing ma­chine part, an ICE2 or ICE3 IO-Link mas­ter, and a BTC22 em­bed­ded PC from Pep­perl+Fuchs.

Plug and Play

These com­pon­ents are simply in­stalled ac­cord­ing to the sup­plied wir­ing dia­gram and con­nec­ted to the net­work. As soon as the power is switched on, the sys­tem con­fig­ures it­self. The vi­bra­tion sensor trans­mits its meas­ured val­ues to the IO-Link mas­ter, which for­wards them to the Box Thin Cli­ent BTC22 for pre-pro­cessing and ag­greg­a­tion. This fan­less com­puter also acts as an edge gate­way and is de­signed for ro­bust in­dus­tri­al use.

After a short teach-in phase, it trans­mits the pro­cessed data to the so-called "In­tel­li­gence Core", Bosch's di­git­al twin plat­form. The di­git­al twin ana­lyzes and pro­cesses the col­lec­ted sys­tem data to cre­ate a clear status pic­ture from which op­tions for ac­tion can now be de­rived. A sim­u­la­tion mod­el with the IAPM tool (In­teg­rated As­set Per­form­ance Man­age­ment) en­ables real-time ana­lys­is, which is based on es­tab­lished cloud plat­forms such as AWS or MS Azure and also uses ma­chine learn­ing al­gorithms and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. 

Cus­tom­iz­a­tion and Scal­ing

The data can also be called up on the dash­board in the browser. Ex­ist­ing and fu­ture mech­an­ic­al prob­lems are visu­al­ized in de­tailed 3-D mod­els. The eval­u­ation soft­ware cal­cu­lates re­main­ing run­ning times and of­fers dif­fer­en­ti­ated pre­dic­tions of pre­dict­able fail­ures. This makes it pos­sible to plan main­ten­ance based on the con­di­tion of the sys­tem and ac­tu­al re­quire­ments. At the same time, the eval­u­ation can be used to fur­ther op­tim­ize pro­cesses. If a threshold value is ex­ceeded or a crit­ic­al situ­ation oc­curs, a cor­res­pond­ing no­ti­fic­a­tion can be sent as a push mes­sage by email, text mes­sage, and oth­er com­mu­nic­a­tion tools to spe­cified re­cip­i­ents.

As a mod­u­lar sys­tem, the Di­git­al Twin Starter Kit can be in­di­vidu­ally ad­ap­ted to the re­quire­ments of the re­spect­ive sys­tem and scaled up as needed. Ex­perts from Bosch Di­git­al Twin In­dus­tries and Pep­perl+Fuchs sup­port users with co­ordin­ated ad­vice on cus­tom-fit in­teg­ra­tion and up­grades in line with II­oT and In­dustry 4.0. 
 

Ac­ro­mag now of­fers a step­per mo­tor con­trol­ler in their Bus­Works® NT Series of Eth­er­net I/O mod­ules. The new NT2710 mod­ule provides six pulse train/lo­gic out­puts, six en­coder in­puts, and four gen­er­al-pur­pose di­git­al I/O for mo­tion con­trol ap­plic­a­tions with step­per mo­tor drivers. A wide vari­ety of com­mands are sup­por­ted to pre­cisely con­trol the step­per mo­tor po­s­i­tion, speed and dir­ec­tion. Lin­ear, tri­an­gu­lar, and trapezoid­al S-Curve ac­cel­er­a­tion/de­cel­er­a­tion pro­fil­ing re­duces mech­an­ic­al stress for smooth­er move­ments. Pro­gram­mable con­trol­lers (PLCs/PACs) in­ter­face with the NT2710 mod­ule us­ing Mod­bus TCP/IP, Eth­er­Net/IP, or PROFINET net­work pro­to­cols. An OPC UA serv­er, MQTT cli­ent, and REST­ful API are also provided to sup­port In­dus­tri­al In­ter­net of Things (II­oT) ap­plic­a­tions. 

In­teg­rated DIN rail bus for up to 64 chan­nels over one IP ad­dress

NTE Eth­er­net mod­els provide dual RJ45 ports for net­work com­mu­nic­a­tion plus the step­per I/O con­trol chan­nels. NTX ex­pan­sion mod­ules add ex­tra I/O chan­nels to con­trol more mo­tors or axes. Three NTX mod­ules can link to the NTE com­mu­nic­a­tion mod­ule through an in­teg­rated DIN rail bus in­ter­fa­cing up to 64 chan­nels over a single Eth­er­net IP ad­dress. A vari­ety of sig­nal pro­cessing func­tions are avail­able on oth­er NT Series ana­logue and dis­crete I/O mod­ules, which can be com­bined to mon­it­or or con­trol voltage, cur­rent and tem­per­at­ure sig­nals. Ap­plic­a­tions in­clude ma­chin­ing, pack­aging, po­s­i­tion­ing, dis­pens­ing, print­ing, and many oth­er in­dus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tions. Mo­tion con­trol func­tions can now be in­teg­rated with data ac­quis­i­tion, status mon­it­or­ing, on/off con­trol, pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance, en­ergy man­age­ment, and many oth­er re­quire­ments.

The Bus­Works NT2000 Series of­fers a broad vari­ety of I/O sig­nal pro­cessing op­tions. Six­teen I/O con­fig­ur­a­tions are avail­able as either NTE Eth­er­net I/O or NTX ex­pan­sion I/O mod­els. Ana­log I/O mod­els fea­ture up to six­teen in­puts or eight out­puts for mon­it­or­ing and con­trolling cur­rent or voltage sig­nals. Dis­crete I/O mod­els provide six­teen tan­dem in­put/out­put chan­nels or six mech­an­ic­al re­lays to sense or switch on/off and high/low lo­gic levels. For tem­per­at­ure meas­ure­ment, ther­mo­couple and RTD in­put mod­els sup­port many sensor types and ranges.
 

Turck's NIC-Q86-ETH in­duct­ive Eth­er­net mul­ti­pro­tocol coupler is open­ing up the pos­sible range of ap­plic­a­tion fields for con­tact­less power and data trans­mis­sion. The coupler trans­mits up to 50 W of power as well as 100 Mbit/s full du­plex latency-free (<1 µs) data in all Eth­er­net pro­to­cols. This makes the new sys­tem the ideal in­ter­face between mov­ing com­pon­ents or mo­bile ap­plic­a­tions and ma­chine parts for par­tic­u­larly high real-time, per­form­ance or data rate re­quire­ments, es­pe­cially when they are con­nec­ted via Turck's mul­ti­pro­tocol and Eth­er­CAT I/O mod­ules and con­trol­lers that op­er­ate auto­mat­ic­ally in Profinet, Eth­er­net/IP, Mod­bus TCP and Eth­er­CAT net­works. Turck con­tin­ues to of­fer the com­pact and ro­bust NIC couplers with IO-Link COM3 and 230.4 kbit/s for ap­plic­a­tions in the IO-Link en­vir­on­ment and for up to 18 watts of power.

Trans­mis­sion up to 10 mm dis­tance

The Fast Star­tup func­tion (ramp-up time: 450 ms) en­ables the coupler to be used op­tim­ally in ap­plic­a­tions with fre­quent tool changes or pro­duc­tion pro­cesses with fast cycle times. The com­bin­a­tion of IP65 pro­tec­tion, the max­im­um trans­mis­sion dis­tance of 10 mm and the in­de­pend­ence of the trans­mit­ted Eth­er­net pro­tocol makes the NIC an ef­fi­cient solu­tion for OEMs and users with chan­ging sys­tem re­quire­ments. A coupler set con­sists of a primary and a sec­ond­ary part (NICP/NICS-Q86-ETH). Both parts can also be dy­nam­ic­ally coupled with any oth­er primary or sec­ond­ary parts.

Typ­ic­al areas of ap­plic­a­tion for the couplers are mo­bile load car­ri­ers, rotary in­dex­ing tables, ro­tat­ing tools or mo­bile pick-to-light sys­tems. 
 

On con­struc­tion sites with blind spots, a con­struc­tion ma­chine equipped with the ifm O3M AI 2D/3D in­tel­li­gent sensor sys­tem can re­verse more quickly. A mu­ni­cip­al vehicle can stop re­li­ably, even if the per­son cross­ing is dif­fi­cult to de­tect. At air­ports or con­tain­er ter­min­als, the sensor sys­tem guides the po­s­i­tion­ing of a pas­sen­ger board­ing bridge or a con­tain­er to with­in cen­ti­metres without risk of col­li­sion. The com­bin­a­tion of the two tech­no­lo­gies vir­tu­ally elim­in­ates the an­noy­ing false trig­gers that are al­most in­ev­it­able with con­ven­tion­al 3D sys­tems. The num­ber of false alarms is sig­ni­fic­antly re­duced. This is be­cause the sys­tem can de­tect wheth­er there is a per­son or a pile of earth in the vehicle’s path. The res­ult is in­creased ef­fi­ciency in the work pro­cess.

Im­proved res­ults in a ra­di­us up to 25 meters

Such is achieved through the unique com­bin­a­tion of a 3D PMD sensor and 2D AI cam­era in an em­bed­ded area mon­it­or­ing sys­tem. Sys­tem re­li­ab­il­ity is greatly en­hanced by fus­ing data from two dif­fer­ent types of sensors on a fully in­teg­rated and cal­ib­rated plat­form. AI ana­lys­is of the 2D cam­era data im­proves the qual­ity of ob­ject de­tec­tion, en­abling it to dis­tin­guish between people and oth­er obstacles. The new col­li­sion warn­ing sys­tem works much bet­ter and more ac­cur­ately than con­ven­tion­al solu­tions. The O3M AI smart sensor sys­tem uses the data from the 2D and 3D cam­er­as to gen­er­ate a video that dis­plays the sur­round­ings and sim­ul­tan­eously over­lays in­form­a­tion on the ex­act dis­tances to all ob­jects and people with­in a ra­di­us of up to 25 metres onto the im­age. The O3M AI can al­ways tell wheth­er emer­gency brak­ing, a con­trolled stop or de­cel­er­a­tion would be ap­pro­pri­ate in a giv­en situ­ation. 

The high-res­ol­u­tion di­git­al Eth­er­net cam­era is equipped with a power­ful pro­cessor with AI ac­cel­er­at­or (NPU). This en­ables ul­tra-fast pro­cessing of the AI al­gorithms for per­son de­tec­tion dir­ectly in the sys­tem. In ad­di­tion to the Eth­er­net cam­era, a 3D PMD cam­era is in­teg­rated. It provides an ac­cur­ate dis­tance meas­ure­ment to the ob­ject in every single pixel based on the PMD time-of-flight prin­ciple. Depth map­ping from the 3D sys­tem and video from the Eth­er­net cam­era can be com­bined or used on their own, de­pend­ing on the ap­plic­a­tion.

Trained for in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ments

The O3M AI’s per­son and obstacle de­tec­tion has been op­tim­ised for mo­bile ma­chines. The col­li­sion warn­ing sys­tem can ac­cur­ately dis­tin­guish between a dis­tant obstacle and a per­son in close prox­im­ity, even if that per­son is ly­ing on the ground, is wear­ing dark cloth­ing or is dif­fi­cult for con­ven­tion­al sys­tems to de­tect due to lar­ger tools or un­usu­al pos­ture. It works in both bright sun­light and twi­light and has a max­im­um range of 25 metres with an ac­cur­acy of 10 cen­ti­metres. 

The AI, hard­ware and soft­ware have been de­veloped in Ger­many by ifm. A wide vari­ety of people, equip­ment and work po­s­i­tions from the typ­ic­al mo­bile ma­chine work en­vir­on­ment are in­cluded in the AI train­ing ex­amples. The res­ult is a far great­er grad­a­tion of pos­sible alarms and warn­ings from the sys­tem. When it comes to strik­ing the right bal­ance between ef­fi­ciency and safety, this is an im­port­ant cri­terion. 

The new com­bined sensor sys­tem for mo­bile ma­chines is avail­able in sev­er­al ver­sions. 
 

Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al an­nounces fea­ture en­hance­ments to its tMan­ager product line, en­abling seam­less, bi-dir­ec­tion­al com­mu­nic­a­tion between Siemens PLCs and SQL data­bases. The latest up­date in­tro­duces sym­bol brows­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies for Siemens S7-1200 and S7-1500 con­trol­lers, sig­ni­fic­antly re­du­cing in­teg­ra­tion time and elim­in­at­ing the need for manu­al tag cre­ation. The en­hanced Siemens con­nect­or builds on Soft­ing's proven tMan­ager in-chassis con­nectiv­ity plat­form and ex­pands tMan­ager Con­trol­Lo­gix and tMan­ager IPC (In­dus­tri­al PC) to sup­port Siemens con­trol­lers in ad­di­tion to Rock­well and Mod­bus PLCs. Users can now browse PLC sym­bols and SQL data­base fields dir­ectly, set up trig­gers and de­ploy in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions such as track and trace, qual­ity mon­it­or­ing, KPI dash­boards and re­cipe down­loads.

Sym­bol brows­ing speeds up project real­iz­a­tion

Pre­vi­ously, Siemens in­teg­ra­tion re­quired time-con­sum­ing, manu­al sym­bol setup. With this new func­tion­al­ity, brows­ing and map­ping sym­bols from Siemens S7 1200 and 1500 con­trol­lers is now just as stream­lined as it is with Rock­well PLCs. The up­date also main­tains sup­port for leg­acy sym­bol cre­ation with Siemens S7 300, 400, 1200 and 1500 con­trol­lers, en­sur­ing full back­ward com­pat­ib­il­ity for ex­ist­ing in­stall­a­tions.

As man­u­fac­tur­ers face in­creas­ing pres­sure to im­prove trace­ab­il­ity, re­duce er­rors and gain real-time in­sights from plant-floor data, leg­acy ap­proaches like clip­board log­ging or cus­tom-coded solu­tions of­ten fall short. tMan­ager ad­dresses these chal­lenges with a no-code, off-the-shelf solu­tion that’s easy to de­ploy and main­tain. 

With ro­bust in-chassis and IPC-based ar­chi­tec­ture, built-in fault tol­er­ance, store-and-for­ward cap­ab­il­it­ies and scal­able in­teg­ra­tion with mul­tiple PLCs and data­bases, the solu­tion of­fers a re­li­able and sup­port­able path to di­git­al trans­form­a­tion. It en­ables rap­id im­ple­ment­a­tion of high-value in­dus­tri­al use cases in­clud­ing KPI mon­it­or­ing, high-speed sort­ing, re­cipe man­age­ment and MES in­teg­ra­tion — without the com­plex­ity of OPC pro­tocol trans­la­tion or PC-based mid­dle­ware.
 

On the jour­ney to great­er ef­fi­ciency, agil­ity and sus­tain­ab­il­ity, the pro­cess in­dus­tries are be­ing trans­formed by two dis­tinct yet com­ple­ment­ary tech­no­logy trends. To­geth­er, they rep­res­ent a new ar­chi­tec­tur­al ap­proach that’s mak­ing con­trol in­fra­struc­tures smarter, safer, more autonom­ous, and more re­li­able. As key en­a­blers for plant own­ers’ wider di­git­al­iz­a­tion strategies, they’re also pav­ing the way for a flex­ible, freely scal­able auto­ma­tion fu­ture. 

The first of these tech­no­lo­gic­al en­a­blers is edge com­put­ing. An in­creas­ingly im­port­ant ele­ment of today’s auto­ma­tion sys­tem and in­dus­tri­al pro­du­cers’ wider di­git­al­iz­a­tion strategies, edge com­put­ing brings real-time pro­cessing power, the host­ing of ap­plic­a­tions and data stor­age closer to where they de­liv­er the greatest value – at the point of data pro­duc­tion. En­abled by tech­no­lo­gic­al ad­vances in in­fra­struc­ture, con­tain­er­iz­a­tion, con­nectiv­ity, and AI, edge af­fords a host of be­ne­fits in in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion en­vir­on­ments. These in­clude great­er per­form­ance, faster re­sponse times, re­duced latency and im­proved re­si­li­ence, as well as more ef­fi­cient use of avail­able net­work re­sources and strengthened cy­ber­se­cur­ity.

Rap­id re­sponse, great­er re­si­li­ence

By en­abling real-time data pro­cessing dir­ectly at the source, near sensors, ac­tu­at­ors, and oth­er devices, edge com­put­ing al­lows con­trol and mon­it­or­ing sys­tems to re­spond quickly to chan­ging con­di­tions. By pro­cessing data loc­ally, it avoids delays caused by send­ing in­form­a­tion to dis­tant serv­ers or data cen­ters, en­sur­ing near-in­stant­an­eous re­sponses for safety-crit­ic­al and time-sens­it­ive op­er­a­tions. 

Pro­cessing data at the source sig­ni­fic­antly re­duces the need for high-band­width con­nec­tions and lowers the cost of trans­fer­ring large volumes of data to cloud-based ap­plic­a­tions. Edge sys­tems can also op­er­ate in­de­pend­ently, provid­ing re­si­li­ence dur­ing net­work dis­rup­tions or cloud ser­vice out­ages. This makes edge com­put­ing es­pe­cially valu­able in re­mote in­dus­tri­al sites or mo­bile en­vir­on­ments, where in­ter­net con­nectiv­ity may be lim­ited or un­re­li­able. 

Pla­cing com­put­ing re­sources at the site where data is gen­er­ated – such as a mine, off­shore wind­farm or oil plat­form – helps re­duce cy­ber­se­cur­ity risks as­so­ci­ated with trans­mit­ting in­dus­tri­al fa­cil­ity data over pub­lic net­works to re­mote data cen­ters. While both private and pub­lic clouds of­fer strong built-in se­cur­ity, keep­ing com­mer­cially sens­it­ive data on-site en­sures it re­mains un­der dir­ect con­trol of plant op­er­at­ors, min­im­iz­ing the risk of un­au­thor­ized ac­cess or data ex­filtra­tion. In ad­di­tion, pro­cessing data loc­ally al­lows faster con­tain­ment of cy­ber threats. If one edge node is com­prom­ised, the im­pact can be isol­ated without af­fect­ing the broad­er net­work. This loc­al­ized ap­proach also helps or­gan­iz­a­tions avoid po­ten­tial leg­al or reg­u­lat­ory com­plic­a­tions re­lated to stor­ing or pro­cessing sens­it­ive data in oth­er jur­is­dic­tions.

Re­spond­ing to the voice of pro­cess in­dustry end-users

Since its in­tro­duc­tion in the 1970s, the Dis­trib­uted Con­trol Sys­tem (DCS) has re­vo­lu­tion­ized in­dus­tri­al op­er­a­tions by im­prov­ing ef­fi­ciency, safety and re­li­ab­il­ity. While tech­no­logy has evolved over the dec­ades, its core pur­pose re­mains the same: re­du­cing the need for con­stant hu­man over­sight in con­trol and mon­it­or­ing tasks. 

Dur­ing this time plant own­ers have faced grow­ing chal­lenges, from glob­al com­pet­i­tion and stricter safety reg­u­la­tions to rising cy­ber­se­cur­ity threats. At the same time, they have been forced to ad­apt to meet rap­idly chan­ging cus­tom­er de­mands which re­quire flex­ible, scal­able pro­duc­tion sys­tems cap­able of de­liv­er­ing cus­tom­ized products quickly. The pres­sure to pro­duce more with less con­tin­ues to in­tensi­fy as the pro­cess in­dus­tries re­spond to the de­mands of en­ergy trans­ition and de­car­bon­iz­a­tion. Plants must be­come lean­er, clean­er and more en­ergy ef­fi­cient, while min­im­iz­ing waste and shift­ing to re­new­able power sources. Com­pound­ing these chal­lenges are the real­it­ies of a chan­ging work­force; where ex­per­i­enced en­gin­eers are re­tir­ing and be­ing re­placed by di­git­al-nat­ive em­ploy­ees that lack the dec­ades of ‘tra­di­tion­al’ and ex­pert know­ledge of their pre­de­cessors.

By ac­cel­er­at­ing de­cision-mak­ing and sup­port­ing a more re­spons­ive, re­si­li­ent con­trol paradigm that can in­teg­rate new cap­ab­il­it­ies without dis­rupt­ing ex­ist­ing op­er­a­tions, edge com­put­ing ad­dresses these chal­lenges by of­fer­ing plant own­ers a power­ful way to max­im­ize the value of their pro­cess data.

Re-ap­prais­ing the dec­ades-old auto­ma­tion paradigm

From an auto­ma­tion stand­point, in­dustry’s on­go­ing push to­ward di­git­al­iz­a­tion is driv­ing the con­ver­gence of op­er­a­tion­al tech­no­logy (OT) and in­form­a­tion tech­no­logy (IT). This in­teg­ra­tion en­ables the de­ploy­ment of value-ad­ded di­git­al ap­plic­a­tions that can reside either on-premises or in the cloud. For ex­ist­ing fa­cil­it­ies, it’s es­sen­tial that these new auto­ma­tion cap­ab­il­it­ies be in­tro­duced with min­im­al dis­rup­tion to cur­rent pro­cesses and op­er­a­tions.

In re­sponse to grow­ing de­mands from pro­cess in­dustry cus­tom­ers for great­er ef­fi­ciency, flex­ib­il­ity, in­ter­op­er­ab­il­ity, se­cur­ity, and sus­tain­ab­il­ity, there is a fun­da­ment­al re­think­ing of long-stand­ing auto­ma­tion sys­tem mod­els. Plant own­ers are seek­ing to mod­ern­ize and fu­ture-proof their op­er­a­tions while main­tain­ing con­tinu­ity and min­im­iz­ing pro­duc­tion down­time.
Build­ing on dec­ades of ex­per­i­ence de­liv­er­ing pro­cess con­trol solu­tions world­wide, ABB’s re­sponse to these evolving needs is an auto­ma­tion sys­tem that em­braces ad­vances in di­git­al tech­no­logy while pre­serving the ul­tra-re­li­able per­form­ance in­dus­tri­al users de­pend on. 

To­wards mod­u­lar­iz­a­tion and a sep­ar­a­tion of con­cerns

ABB’s vis­ion for a fu­ture-proofed auto­ma­tion sys­tem cen­ters on provid­ing a sep­ar­a­tion of con­cerns; two dis­tinct but in­ter­con­nec­ted soft­ware en­vir­on­ments de­signed to bal­ance re­li­ab­il­ity with in­nov­a­tion. This di­vi­sion sup­ports de­pend­able, real-time pro­cess op­er­a­tions while en­abling open ac­cess to pro­cess and equip­ment data for mon­it­or­ing and op­tim­iz­a­tion. 
These en­vir­on­ments – termed the con­trol and di­git­al en­vir­on­ments – provide a mod­u­lar, scal­able ar­chi­tec­ture that en­cour­ages in­nov­a­tion by sim­pli­fy­ing the in­tro­duc­tion of new tech­no­lo­gies and ser­vices to meet evolving op­er­a­tions de­mands.

The con­trol en­vir­on­ment forms a ro­bust, cy­ber-se­cure found­a­tion for ex­ecut­ing crit­ic­al auto­ma­tion func­tions. It in­cludes the phys­ic­al hard­ware, soft­ware con­fig­ur­a­tions, and net­work in­fra­struc­ture re­quired to en­sure de­term­in­ist­ic, real-time con­trol of in­dus­tri­al pro­cesses. Cru­cially, it lever­ages edge com­put­ing to pro­cess and store data loc­ally, al­low­ing for im­me­di­ate re­sponses to op­er­a­tion­al changes.

Op­er­at­ing along­side this is the di­git­al en­vir­on­ment, which provides se­cure ac­cess to pro­cess data for high­er-level Mon­it­or­ing and Op­tim­iz­a­tion (M&O) ap­plic­a­tions. Hos­ted either on-premises or in the cloud, these ap­plic­a­tions can ana­lyze per­form­ance, pre­dict main­ten­ance needs and drive ef­fi­ciency im­prove­ments without in­ter­fer­ing with core con­trol func­tions. This di­git­al lay­er also acts as a sand­box for de­ploy­ing emer­ging tech­no­lo­gies, such as AI-powered ana­lyt­ics, in­cre­ment­ally and safely via soft­ware-defined meth­ods, avoid­ing costly plant shut­downs or dis­rup­tions.

This dual-en­vir­on­ment ar­chi­tec­ture re­flects in­dustry’s broad­er shift to­ward di­git­al­iz­a­tion, where op­er­a­tion­al and in­form­a­tion­al tech­no­lo­gies (OT and IT) con­verge to un­lock new auto­ma­tion pos­sib­il­it­ies. For ex­ist­ing in­stall­a­tions, it’s es­sen­tial that these in­nov­a­tions be in­teg­rated with min­im­al dis­rup­tion to on­go­ing op­er­a­tions.

A vis­ion for smarter, more re­si­li­ent in­dus­tri­al op­er­a­tions

In re­sponse to grow­ing de­mands for ef­fi­ciency, flex­ib­il­ity, in­ter­op­er­ab­il­ity, se­cur­ity, and sus­tain­ab­il­ity, pro­cess in­dus­tries are re­think­ing tra­di­tion­al auto­ma­tion mod­els. Plant own­ers seek to mod­ern­ize and fu­ture-proof their sys­tems while main­tain­ing con­tinu­ity and con­trol.

ABB’s vis­ion of an auto­ma­tion eco­sys­tem ad­dresses these needs by em­bra­cing ad­vances in cloud nat­ive tech­no­logy and con­nectiv­ity, without com­prom­ising the ul­tra-re­li­able per­form­ance that in­dus­tri­al users ex­pect. Built on dec­ades of ex­per­i­ence, this ap­proach en­ables seam­less in­teg­ra­tion of new cap­ab­il­it­ies while pre­serving the in­teg­rity of core op­er­a­tions. The com­mit­ment to con­tinu­ity al­lows pro­cess in­dustry users to meet today’s chal­lenges, in­clud­ing sus­tain­ab­il­ity, en­ergy trans­ition and a new gen­er­a­tion work­force, while ad­apt­ing to evolving mar­ket op­por­tun­it­ies.
 

EM ac­tu­ation is en­abling light­er, more mod­u­lar designs that prom­ise great­er ef­fi­ciency, sim­pli­fied main­ten­ance, and a clear­er path to cer­ti­fic­a­tion.Wheth­er you’re talk­ing about hy­brid re­gion­al jets to next-gen­er­a­tion air tax­is it’s in­creas­ingly clear that the fu­ture of flight is elec­tric, and elec­tromech­an­ic­al (EM) ac­tu­ation is play­ing a cent­ral role in mak­ing this a real­ity. As air­craft sys­tems move away from hy­draul­ics and pneu­mat­ics in fa­vor of all-elec­tric ar­chi­tec­tures, EM ac­tu­ation is en­abling light­er, more mod­u­lar designs that prom­ise great­er ef­fi­ciency, sim­pli­fied main­ten­ance, and a clear­er path to cer­ti­fic­a­tion.

Regal Rexnord Aerospace Solu­tions is help­ing to ad­vance the ad­op­tion of elec­tro-mech­an­ic­al ac­tu­ation by de­liv­er­ing in­teg­rated sub­sys­tems that com­bine high-per­form­ance mo­tors, gear­ing, brakes, and con­trol sys­tems. Draw­ing on the in­dustry ex­pert­ise of its brands, in­clud­ing Rexnord Aerospace, Koll­mor­gen™, Portes­cap™, Nook™, and Delavan™, Form­s­prag Clutch, Thom­son, the com­pany is help­ing to sup­port a wide range of aerospace ap­plic­a­tions through a uni­fied, sys­tem-level ap­proach. 

The shift to all-elec­tric

For dec­ades, hy­draul­ic sys­tems have de­livered the mo­tion needed for flight con­trol, land­ing gear, and high-lift sys­tems. But as new aerospace plat­forms emerge, the draw­backs of hy­draul­ics, such as com­plex plumb­ing, weight pen­al­ties, and in­tens­ive main­ten­ance, are be­com­ing more ap­par­ent. 

That’s where EM Ac­tu­ation comes in. By re­pla­cing tra­di­tion­al hy­draul­ic sys­tems with com­pact, elec­tric­ally driv­en ac­tu­at­ors, air­craft de­sign­ers can re­duce weight, sim­pli­fy ar­chi­tec­tures, and in­crease sys­tem flex­ib­il­ity. The res­ult is faster as­sembly, su­per­i­or con­trol, and im­proved re­li­ab­il­ity. 

"We’re see­ing a clear shift to­ward fully elec­tric fly-by-wire sys­tems, par­tic­u­larly in emer­ging plat­forms like eVTOLs and un­crewed air­craft," ex­plains John Mey­er, Seni­or Dir­ect­or Mar­ket­ing at Regal Rexnord. "EM Ac­tu­ation of­fers a stream­lined al­tern­at­ive with real be­ne­fits in in­teg­ra­tion, ef­fi­ciency, and per­form­ance."

Un­lock­ing the air­craft of to­mor­row 

Mod­ern EM Ac­tu­ation sys­tems are far more than a simple mo­tor and gear­box. To meet aerospace de­mands, they must be pre­ci­sion en­gin­eered for high re­li­ab­il­ity, min­im­al weight, and ex­cep­tion­al con­trol re­spons­ive­ness. This calls for a co­ordin­ated ap­proach where every ele­ment – mo­tors, gear­ing, sensors, and brakes – is de­signed to work to­geth­er as a com­plete sys­tem. 

“In most of the pro­grams we sup­port, the ac­tu­at­or isn't something pulled dir­ectly from a cata­logue,” notes Ju­li­an Del Campo, Seni­or Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Man­ager at Regal Rexnord. “It’s a tightly in­teg­rated sys­tem that tail­ors proven designs to the en­vel­ope, load, and re­spons­ive­ness re­quired for that air­frame. That’s where the value of early en­gin­eer­ing col­lab­or­a­tion really shines.” 

This is ex­actly why EM ac­tu­ation sup­pli­ers should be deeply in­volved with design projects from day one, help­ing OEMs and sys­tem de­sign­ers ex­plore trade-offs between ac­tu­at­or size, power con­sump­tion, and re­dund­ancy strategies. A col­lab­or­at­ive pro­cess like this ac­cel­er­ates de­vel­op­ment and sup­ports a smooth path to com­pli­ance – both key factors as aerospace in­nov­a­tion ac­cel­er­ates and com­presses timelines. 

Pro­grams that once spanned a dec­ade now aim for cer­ti­fic­a­tion in a frac­tion of that time. The emer­ging ad­vanced air mo­bil­ity (AAM) sec­tor is a clear ex­ample, with de­velopers work­ing to de­liv­er elec­tric air­craft to mar­ket on am­bi­tious sched­ules. That’s adding ex­treme em­phas­is on agil­ity and scalab­il­ity, as EM ac­tu­ation sys­tems must not only meet per­form­ance tar­gets but do so with­in short, it­er­at­ive de­vel­op­ment cycles. Sup­pli­ers need to of­fer rap­id pro­to­typ­ing, cus­tom­iz­able solu­tions, and deep fa­mili­ar­ity with aerospace stand­ards. 

“Be­ing able to take a proven aerospace mo­tor or re­solv­er design and ad­apt it quickly to a new plat­form is a huge ad­vant­age,” says Ju­li­an. “It re­duces risk and shortens the path to flight qual­i­fic­a­tion. That’s crit­ic­al when every mo­ment counts.” 

From in­nov­a­tion to in­teg­ra­tion 

As the bound­ar­ies of EM Ac­tu­ation ex­pand, the tech­no­logy is reach­ing in­to new areas of the air­craft. In the fu­ture, elec­tric ac­tu­ation is ex­pec­ted to play a role not just in sec­ond­ary func­tions but also in primary flight con­trols, land­ing sys­tems, and high-lift devices, even in large com­mer­cial air­craft. 

This evol­u­tion is already un­der­way, and it un­der­scores the need for sys­tems that are not only ro­bust but also easy to in­teg­rate. EM Ac­tu­ation solu­tions must de­liv­er pre­ci­sion con­trol, en­vir­on­ment­al dur­ab­il­ity, and fault tol­er­ance, all while fit­ting in­to the tight weight and space con­straints of mod­ern air­craft. 

At the same time, de­velopers are seek­ing out part­ners who can sup­port them with more than just com­pon­ents. Regal Rexnord’s mo­tion con­trol brands of­fer dec­ades of aerospace ex­per­i­ence, along with a proven track re­cord of col­lab­or­a­tion across a broad spec­trum of air and de­fense plat­forms.
 

Heavy loads are of­ten moved by means of hy­draul­ic sys­tems or large plan­et­ary gears. However, cyc­loid­al gears are clearly su­per­i­or in most cases. Their spe­cial design prin­ciple en­ables very high re­duc­tion ra­tios with only two to three gear stages, which guar­an­tees pre­cise and re­li­able po­s­i­tion­ing with­in a hun­dredth of a mil­li­metre in an ex­tremely com­pact design. Nabtesco knows the spe­cif­ic chal­lenges of heavy-duty ap­plic­a­tions and im­ple­ments ro­bust and ef­fi­cient gear and drive solu­tions.

Ro­bust cyc­loid­al gears for pre­cise po­s­i­tion­ing of heavy loads

Cyc­loid­al gears use cams and rollers for power trans­mis­sion. This design en­sures vir­tu­ally full con­tact and even dis­tri­bu­tion of forces with­in the gear­box, which pro­duces high ri­gid­ity. As a res­ult, it is pos­sible to trans­mit very high torques with max­im­um pre­ci­sion and smooth op­er­a­tion. The in­crease in back­lash is in­fin­ites­im­al, even over long peri­ods (hys­ter­esis loss < 1 ar­cmin, purely mech­an­ic­al back­lash 0.1 - 0.2 ar­cmin). In ad­di­tion, min­im­um wear op­er­a­tion en­sures a long ser­vice life. The in­teg­rated an­gu­lar ball bear­ings ab­sorb both axi­al and ra­di­al loads and bend­ing mo­ments, and provide for high mo­ment ri­gid­ity and res­ist­ance to im­pacts and over­load­ing (up to 500 % of the rated torque). By the way: In cyc­loid­al gears, the ef­fi­ciency im­proves as the load in­creases. The reas­on: High­er torque res­ults in high­er ri­gid­ity. Ri­gid­ity re­duces elasti­city in the gear, which causes an in­crease in ef­fi­ciency.

Ex­cep­tion­al per­form­ance up to 70,000 Nm

Wheth­er in ro­bot­ics, mech­an­ic­al en­gin­eer­ing or oth­er high-tech in­dus­tries: Wherever ex­act po­s­i­tion­ing and ab­so­lute re­li­ab­il­ity are re­quired, Nabtesco gears are the first choice. The product port­fo­lio ranges from highly in­teg­rable com­pon­ent sets, com­pact gear units, and dy­nam­ic servo gear­boxes to power­ful rotary in­dex­ers and cov­ers a torque spec­trum up to 70,000 Nm. The fol­low­ing parts of the port­fo­lio are es­pe­cially suit­able for use in heavy-duty ap­plic­a­tions: Neco®HT (mod­u­lar high-torque gears), RV-N (sol­id shaft ro­bot­ic gears), RV-C (hol­low shaft ro­bot­ic gears) and RS (hol­low shaft rotary in­dex­ers). The product range also in­cludes the world’s largest pre­ci­sion gear­box (RV-2800N) and the world’s largest plug-and-play pre­ci­sion gear­box (Neco® HT-900).

Wide range of heavy-duty ap­plic­a­tions

Nabtesco cyc­loid­al gears are de­signed for high torques and heavy loads and have proven them­selves a mil­lion times over in count­less heavy-duty ap­plic­a­tions. Heavy-duty po­si­tion­ers (large head and tail­stock po­si­tion­ers, “L” and “H” po­si­tion­ers) be­ne­fit from the spe­cif­ic prop­er­ties of the heavy-duty solu­tions, as do ma­chine tools (e.g. ma­chin­ing centres for large gear­wheels, feed­er sys­tems for large, heavy parts, tower drilling centres for wind tur­bines), pro­duc­tion plants (such as “big wheel” re­fri­ger­at­or pro­duc­tion, ex­tru­sion blow-mould­ing ma­chines) and in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion (hand­ling of large glass panes, met­al sheets, heavy ma­chine parts, or en­tire vehicles).

Highest ser­vice level

In co­oper­a­tion with the cus­tom­er the com­pany im­ple­ments cus­tom drive solu­tions that are per­fectly ad­ap­ted to the par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge. The cyc­loid­al gear spe­cial­ist of­fers full-ser­vice sup­port and as­sist­ance with all as­pects of gears and drive sys­tems – from ini­tial con­sulta­tion to se­lec­tion and design, as well as pro­duc­tion and main­ten­ance. 

Leine Linde is proud to launch a com­pre­hens­ive new safety range along­side the cut­ting-edge FSI 600 series. The series is a fam­ily of safety-cer­ti­fied rotary en­coders, en­gin­eered to meet the highest func­tion­al safety stand­ards. With this ini­ti­at­ive, Leine Linde en­ables in­dus­tri­al play­ers to en­hance work­place safety while meet­ing grow­ing glob­al reg­u­lat­ory de­mands. As safety re­quire­ments in in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion con­tin­ue to rise, so does the need for cer­ti­fied, high-per­form­ance safety products. Leine Linde’s new solu­tion de­liv­ers on both – help­ing lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers pro­tect people, ma­chinery and pro­duc­tion en­vir­on­ments world­wide.

Cer­ti­fied for the most de­mand­ing ap­plic­a­tions

The FSI (Func­tion­al Safety In­teg­rated) 600 series marks a sig­ni­fic­ant step for­ward in Leine Linde’s port­fo­lio. With its SIL3 and PLe cat­egory 4, func­tion­al safety com­pli­ance it is cer­ti­fied for use in the most de­mand­ing safety ap­plic­a­tions. The ab­so­lute in­duct­ive sens­ing of­fers a dur­able, con­tact­less tech­no­logy for long-term re­li­ab­il­ity in harsh en­vir­on­ments. PROFIsafe over PROFINET en­sures safe com­mu­nic­a­tion in real-time in­dus­tri­al net­works.

The first product in the FSI 600 series, FSI 608, is a unique safety en­coder that fully com­plies with the latest stand­ard: IEC 61800-5-3, cov­er­ing func­tion­al, elec­tric­al and en­vir­on­ment­al en­coder safety. FSI 608 is among the first en­coders on the mar­ket to meet this level. With mul­tiple mech­an­ic­al op­tions, scal­able res­ol­u­tion and com­pre­hens­ive built-in safety func­tions, the FSI 608 of­fers easy in­teg­ra­tion in­to di­verse auto­ma­tion setups.
 

NORD has in­creased the max­im­um torques of its UNI­CASE worm gear units. The NORD de­vel­op­ment team thus achieved in­creased per­form­ance of 10 to 15 per­cent – without chan­ging the gear units’ out­er (con­nec­tion) di­men­sions, or their gen­er­al out­er ap­pear­ance. The re­li­able and eco­nom­ic drive solu­tion of­fers high­er per­form­ance without the need of ad­just­ing ex­ist­ing cus­tom­er con­fig­ur­a­tions. As the hous­ing sizes re­main un­changed, the worm gear units will still be avail­able as a drop-in solu­tion for main­ten­ance works or re­pairs. To save costs and in­stall­a­tion space, smal­ler sizes can be se­lec­ted ac­cord­ing to the ap­plic­a­tion, res­ult­ing in more con­struct­ive free­dom in ma­chine and sys­tem design.

High-skilled en­gin­eer­ing

The (con­nec­tion) di­men­sions have not changed, but in or­der to im­ple­ment high­er power ranges, NORD in­cor­por­ated new worm shafts with lar­ger bear­ing seats, as well as an ad­di­tion­al re­in­force­ment of the worm wheel it­self. The cur­rent UNI­CASE worm gear unit series of­fers a power range from 0.12 kW to 15 kW, and torques between 90 Nm and 3,000 Nm. Oth­er product ad­vant­ages in­clude smooth and quiet run­ning, high over­load ca­pa­city and ro­bust design. High axi­al and ra­di­al loads en­sure high (op­er­a­tion­al) re­li­ab­il­ity and long ser­vice life.

The UNI­CASE worm gear units in cast iron hous­ings from NORD are avail­able in ap­plic­a­tion-spe­cif­ic ver­sions: as hol­low and sol­id shaft gear units, and for shaft, flange or foot mount­ing. The com­pany’s elec­tric mo­tors can be ad­ded as an in­teg­rated solu­tion. Mo­tor mount­ing via an IEC/NEMA ad­apter is also pos­sible.
 

TE Con­nectiv­ity (TE) is in­tro­du­cing a break­through con­nect­or con­tact plat­ing tech­no­logy: The ECO­NIDUR sur­face plat­ing is de­signed to re­duce tra­di­tion­al pre­cious met­al lay­ers in con­tact sur­faces and helps to sig­ni­fic­antly lower CO₂ emis­sions while main­tain­ing un­com­prom­ised qual­ity stand­ards. The name ECO­NIDUR mir­rors the ad­vant­ages of this nick­el-phos­phor­ous based plat­ing: the con­tact fin­ish is more ECO­lo­gic­ally friendly due to hav­ing a lower product car­bon foot­print, based on the NIck­el-phos­por­ous plat­ing stack ex­cel­lent per­form­ance in DUR­ab­il­ity is con­served. The high-per­form­ance ECO­NIDUR plated con­tacts solu­tion sup­ports en­gin­eers with su­per­i­or vi­bra­tion res­ist­ance and re­li­ab­il­ity for de­mand­ing ap­plic­a­tions. Re­cently de­veloped meas­ure­ment meth­ods help to en­sure high qual­ity in pro­cess and product re­li­ab­il­ity.

Meet­ing in­creas­ing cus­tom­er re­quire­ments

Wheth­er it is high sig­nal in­teg­rity or high vi­bra­tion res­ist­ance, cus­tom­er ex­pect­a­tions have ris­en sig­ni­fic­antly. In most in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions, im­proved pro­tec­tion against vi­bra­tion, fret­ting and cor­ro­sion is es­sen­tial. This is why choos­ing the right plat­ing is so im­port­ant today. ECO­NIDUR plated con­nect­ors will func­tion re­li­ably in many in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions over a long peri­od of time, e.g. in auto­ma­tion con­trol ap­plic­a­tions and mo­tor con­trol sys­tems. They sup­port re­li­able sig­nal trans­mis­sion up to sev­er­al Gbit/s and fea­ture with­stand cap­ab­il­it­ies in terms of vi­bra­tion in the long-term, gas in­flu­ences and mi­cro fric­tion.

Soph­ist­ic­ated stack con­fig­ur­a­tion

The key to this high qual­ity and out­stand­ing per­form­ance is the lay­er struc­ture: ECO­NIDUR con­tacts are plated with a skill­fully en­gin­eered Nick­el-Phos­phor­us plat­ing (NiP) that util­izes a soph­ist­ic­ated stack con­fig­ur­a­tion.

Over­all, ECO­NIDUR plat­ing reaches in min­im­um the same char­ac­ter­ist­ics as a pre­cious met­al plat­ing lay­er. For fret­ting and vi­bra­tion res­ist­ance, ECO­NIDUR plated products are a re­li­able choice. Ac­cord­ing to TE in­tern­al ana­lys­is and cal­cu­la­tions in align­ment with ISO stand­ards (14067/14040/44), CO₂ emis­sions de­crease heav­ily for over 44% com­pared to a pre­cious met­al plat­ing, de­pend­ing on lay­er thick­nesses, per­form­ance level and con­nect­or type – thus con­trib­ut­ing to green­er man­u­fac­tur­ing and sup­ply chains. This de­car­bon­ized product helps cus­tom­ers meet their sus­tain­ab­il­ity goals.
 

The Tsubaki Ka­belschlepp UNIFLEX Ad­vanced 1775 has re­cently been sig­ni­fic­antly en­hanced – not just in the de­tails, but also in its vari­ants. New width op­tions between 100 and 400 mm and dif­fer­ent frame vari­ants (closed or with fold­ing cross­bars in­side or out­side) turn the cable car­ri­er in­to a uni­ver­sal solu­tion for a wide range of ap­plic­a­tions, from the auto­mot­ive in­dustry and ma­chine tool man­u­fac­tur­ing to ag­ri­cul­tur­al tech­no­logy and in­t­ra­lo­gist­ics.

The UA1775 also of­fers prac­tic­al ad­vant­ages from an as­sembly point of view: The cross­bars can be opened and closed in just two easy steps. A simple screw­driver is the only tool re­quired. Should a cross­bar stay open, it is still firmly at­tached to the chain link. If needed, the cross­bars can eas­ily be re­leased with a simple twist­ing mo­tion.

Quiet, dur­able, smooth

The four-part chain link design en­sures quiet run­ning while also sav­ing stor­age space: Few­er parts, many op­tions – that is the es­sence of the mod­u­lar solu­tion. Com­bin­ing the cable car­ri­er with the TS3 di­vider sys­tem opens up new ap­plic­a­tion scen­ari­os, for ex­ample for ex­ten­ded travel lengths or tight spaces. Par­tic­u­larly worth men­tion­ing: The cable car­ri­er is made with up to 35 % re­gran­u­late – a rel­ev­ant as­pect also in light of the in­creas­ing re­quire­ments for sus­tain­ab­il­ity.

A mod­u­lar sys­tem for the fu­ture

The UA1775 series is part of the mod­u­lar UNIFLEX Ad­vanced sys­tem. It can be sup­ple­men­ted with a vari­ety of ac­cessor­ies: from ro­bust stand­ard guide chan­nels made of steel or alu­min­um and uni­ver­sal end con­nect­ors to con­di­tion mon­it­or­ing com­pon­ents. Com­plete sys­tem solu­tions – the TOTAL­TRAX® con­cepts – can also be im­ple­men­ted with these cable car­ri­ers.
 

TDK Lambda in­tro­duces the new RGF board-mount EMI fil­ters. Suit­able for power sup­plies with high in­put cur­rent re­quire­ments, these 20 and 40A fil­ters are de­signed to provide ex­cep­tion­al dif­fer­en­tial mode fil­ter­ing. Lever­aging ad­vanced TDK com­pon­ent tech­no­logy, these mod­ules stream­line sys­tem-level com­pli­ance to CIS­PR as well as oth­er com­pli­ance stand­ards.The RGF fil­ters are en­cap­su­lated for pro­tec­tion in harsh en­vir­on­ments, meas­ure 52.8 x 35.2 x 12.7mm in size, and fea­ture a ro­bust 5-sided met­al case. The design in­cludes two threaded and two non-threaded mount­ing holes, en­sur­ing easy in­stall­a­tion and en­hanced cool­ing in both con­duc­tion and con­vec­tion-cooled sys­tems. Ap­plic­a­tions in­clude harsh in­dus­tri­al, com­mer­cial-off-the-shelf (COTS), test and meas­ure­ment, com­mu­nic­a­tions, broad­cast, and ro­bot­ics.

In­put voltage range from 0 to 80V

When used in con­junc­tion with non-isol­ated DC-DC con­vert­er mod­ules, the fil­ters provide a sig­ni­fic­ant amount of dif­fer­en­tial mode at­ten­u­ation over a broad fre­quency range. This re­duces over­all sys­tem noise and sim­pli­fies com­pli­ance to typ­ic­al EMI stand­ards. The in­put voltage ranges from 0 to 80V and with­stands in­put tran­si­ents of up to 100V for 100ms dur­a­tions. The op­er­at­ing case tem­per­at­ure is between -40 to +120°C, with a qual­i­fied Thermal Cyc­ling Test (TCT) of 700 cycles, or -40 to +125°C with a 60°C/minute ramp, and a 30minute dwell time. The RGF fil­ters are com­pli­ant to MIL-STD-810G 516.6 Pro­ced­ure I & IV for shock and MIL-STD-810G 514.6 Pro­ced­ure I, Cat 10 for vi­bra­tion.
 

The in­nov­at­ive and ad­vanced BoVer­sa en­clos­ure concept from spe­cial­ist man­u­fac­turer BOPLA of­fers cus­tom­ers an in­nov­at­ive mod­ern design suit­able for a wide range of ap­plic­a­tions. Flex­ible and cus­tom­er-spe­cif­ic design op­tions in­clude a light­ing concept, wire­less com­mu­nic­a­tion and max­im­ised cool­ing tech­no­logy. 

Ap­plic­a­tion-spe­cif­ic com­bin­a­tions

For wire­less sys­tems a die-cast alu­mini­um en­clos­ure body with moul­ded-in cool­ing fins can be com­bined with a plastic cov­er, al­low­ing un­hindered ra­dio trans­mis­sion while provid­ing an op­tim­al com­bin­a­tion for wire­less ap­plic­a­tions that re­quire cool­ing. For ef­fi­cient heat dis­sip­a­tion, BoVer­sa has in­teg­rated cool­ing fins in­to the die-cast alu­mini­um en­clos­ure. The point-sym­met­ric­al design of the fins op­tim­ises air­flow and en­sures cool­ing of the en­clos­ure when moun­ted ho­ri­zont­ally or ver­tic­ally. The uni­form air­flow max­im­ises the ef­fi­ciency of cool­ing and provides even and stable tem­per­at­ure dis­tri­bu­tion in the en­clos­ure, in­creas­ing the ser­vice life and re­li­ab­il­ity of the built-in elec­tron­ics.

BoVer­sa has a three-part en­clos­ure struc­ture con­sist­ing of a lower part, a func­tion­al lid and design cov­er which can be com­bined with each oth­er as re­quired. Col­our ac­cents can be ad­ded by com­bin­ing en­clos­ure parts in dif­fer­ent col­ours to suit an ap­plic­a­tion or brand­ing re­quire­ment.

Fea­tures of the new BoVer­sa en­clos­ure sys­tem also in­clude trans­par­ent func­tion lid provid­ing a view in­side the en­clos­ure or built-in dis­plays and open ver­sions for in­teg­ra­tion of key­boards and dis­plays. 

The com­bin­a­tion of high pro­tec­tion class and ma­ter­i­al prop­er­ties en­able use in out­door areas. Plastic ma­ter­i­al PC UL 94 V0 is suit­able for out­door use, en­vir­on­ment­al pro­tec­tion to IP66 / 68 (1.2m - 2h) DIN EN 60529. A pole at­tach­ment is avail­able as an op­tion­al ac­cess­ory. The lower part has a moul­ded-in re­cept­acle for a pres­sure equal­isa­tion dia­phragm that can be "ac­tiv­ated" at the fact­ory.

Equip­ment de­sign­ers can cre­ate a be­spoke en­clos­ure solu­tion by se­lect­ing the re­quired com­pon­ents from the wide range of stand­ard op­tions. But 
BOPLA of­fer cus­tom­ers full box-build and cus­tom­isa­tion ser­vices.
 

Smiths In­ter­con­nect’s mod­u­lar and min­im­od­u­lar con­nect­ors are easy to as­semble, based on the prin­ciple of build­ing blocks with a sys­tem com­posed of two ele­ments: mod­ules and frames. Mod­ules of vari­ous styles and dif­fer­ent con­tact types are avail­able for dif­fer­ent ap­plic­a­tion re­quire­ments, com­bin­ing sig­nal, power, coaxi­al, pneu­mat­ic and, from now on, data con­tact tech­no­lo­gies in­to cus­tom ar­range­ments with­in a single con­nect­or frame.

Mark Kelle­her, Con­nect­ors BU Dir­ect­or at Smiths In­ter­con­nect, said: “Our new Cat5e and Cat6A data trans­mis­sion mod­ules in ac­cord­ance to IEEE 802.3 com­bine the proven tech­nic­al char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the hy­per­bol­oid con­tact with the use of high-qual­ity and com­pli­ant in­su­lat­or ma­ter­i­al - i.e. the polycar­bon­ate fam­ily - to of­fer in­dustry com­pli­ance and high per­form­ance”.

The elec­tric­al per­form­ance of these mod­ules is op­tim­ized through low in­ser­tion loss, con­trolled im­ped­ance, and high re­turn loss char­ac­ter­ist­ics. These factors con­trib­ute to ef­fi­cient sig­nal trans­mis­sion with min­im­al at­ten­u­ation and re­flec­tion, re­du­cing data er­rors and en­sur­ing high-speed com­mu­nic­a­tion. Ad­di­tion­ally, the use of high-qual­ity con­duct­ors and ad­vanced shield­ing tech­niques en­hances res­ist­ance to elec­tro­mag­net­ic in­ter­fer­ence (EMI), fur­ther sta­bil­iz­ing data trans­mis­sion. By of­fer­ing a high in­su­la­tion res­ist­ance and low dielec­tric con­stant, the ma­ter­i­al sup­ports con­sist­ent sig­nal propaga­tion and pre­vents un­wanted ca­pa­cit­ance ef­fects. Moreover, its thermal and mech­an­ic­al sta­bil­ity en­sures long-term re­li­ab­il­ity, even in de­mand­ing en­vir­on­ment­al con­di­tions.

Re­li­able per­form­ance in harsh con­di­tions

Com­pared to ex­ist­ing com­mer­cial solu­tions, Smiths In­ter­con­nect Cat5e and Cat6A data trans­mis­sion mod­ules sur­pass vari­ous lim­it­a­tions, par­tic­u­larly in terms of op­er­at­ing tem­per­at­ure range and dur­ab­il­ity over mul­tiple mat­ing cycles. They are de­signed to with­stand high­er tem­per­at­ures of up to +125°C and lower tem­per­at­ures of -55°C, en­sur­ing re­li­able per­form­ance in harsh en­vir­on­ments where stand­ard com­mer­cial solu­tions may fail due to ma­ter­i­al de­grad­a­tion, sig­nal in­stabil­ity, or mech­an­ic­al stress. This makes them ideal for ap­plic­a­tions in aerospace, de­fense, in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion, and oth­er de­mand­ing sec­tors re­quir­ing con­sist­ent per­form­ance un­der vary­ing en­vir­on­ment­al con­di­tions.

Ad­di­tion­ally, they are en­gin­eered for an ex­ten­ded num­ber of mat­ing cycles (up to 100,000), util­iz­ing high-qual­ity con­tact ma­ter­i­als and ad­vanced sur­face treat­ments that res­ist wear, ox­id­a­tion, and con­tact de­grad­a­tion. This en­hanced dur­ab­il­ity en­sures stable elec­tric­al per­form­ance even after re­peated con­nec­tions and dis­con­nec­tions, thereby re­du­cing main­ten­ance re­quire­ments and ex­tend­ing the over­all lifespan of the product.

Both new solu­tions can be used in the stand­ard ver­sions of the mod­u­lar and min­im­od­u­lar series as well as in those com­pli­ant with EN45545 re­quire­ments for fire safety, and of­fer the fol­low­ing dis­tinct­ive tech­nic­al fea­tures and be­ne­fits:

• Hy­per­bol­oid con­tact tech­no­logy util­iz­ing high-qual­ity con­tact ma­ter­i­als and ad­vanced sur­face treat­ments that res­ist wear, ox­id­a­tion, and con­tact de­grad­a­tion. This en­hanced dur­ab­il­ity en­sures stable elec­tric­al per­form­ance over re­peated con­nec­tions and dis­con­nec­tions. 
• 100,000 mat­ing cycles as a con­nect­or: the ex­ten­ded life of the con­nect­or in ap­plic­a­tions like test and meas­ure­ment, guar­an­tees re­duced main­ten­ance costs through spares res­ult­ing in high­er MT­BF (mean time be­fore fail­ure).
• High-qual­ity in­su­lat­or ma­ter­i­al: This ma­ter­i­al plays a cru­cial role in main­tain­ing dielec­tric prop­er­ties, re­du­cing sig­nal de­grad­a­tion, and en­sur­ing min­im­al crosstalk between con­duct­ors. This res­ults in re­li­able per­form­ance through con­sist­ent sig­nal propaga­tion and un­wanted ca­pa­cit­ance ef­fects. Fur­ther­more, users be­ne­fit from long-term re­li­ab­il­ity through thermal and mech­an­ic­al sta­bil­ity, even in de­mand­ing en­vir­on­ment­al con­di­tions.
• Snap-in con­tacts: quick in­stall­a­tion with simple as­sembly steps, re­quir­ing no spe­cial tools for all mount­ing ar­range­ments e.g. pan­el, float for blind mat­ing. This res­ults in re­duced op­er­at­or's time to as­semble parts and in­creased pro­ductiv­ity.
   

As a res­ult, Smiths In­ter­con­nect Cat5e and Cat6A mod­ules of­fer sig­ni­fic­antly great­er ro­bust­ness and longev­ity com­pared to oth­er solu­tions avail­able in the mar­ket­place, provid­ing a re­li­able, cost-ef­fect­ive, and fu­ture-proof data trans­mis­sion solu­tion.

Fi­nally, in par­al­lel with the in­tro­duc­tion of the new Cat5e and Cat6A mod­ules, Smiths In­ter­con­nect proudly launches the new on­line con­fig­ur­at­or for the fully in­teg­rated mod­u­lar L series.
 

The PIANO product family from PULS has been designed for customers who need reliable, easy-to-use and cost-effective and future-proof DIN rail power supplies. 
The focus of the product family is on providing basic functionality without making compromises on efficiency, lifetime, reliability and small size. Additional and more complex features - such as power reserves - have deliberately omitted. This provides a cost-oriented design with no compromises on quality.

The growing PIANO product family includes more than 17 different DIN rail power supplies offering a range of specifications, such as the input voltage range. This gives customers the opportunity to choose only what is actually required by the specific application. Regional versions are available to cater for systems to be installed exclusively in Europe, China or India (e.g. in a building) where a wide range input (AC 100-240 V) is not required. PIANO versions marked with "C" at the end of the part number (e.g. PIC240.241C) feature an AC input voltage of only 200-240 V and have a cost saving simpler circuit design with fewer components.

Compact housing 

The PIANO Mini-series (PIM), offers users the choice between push-in and screw terminals. Push-in terminals allow time-saving installation without tools and are very robust against shock and vibration. The modern circuit design of the PIANO DIN-rail power supplies fits into a very compact housing. This enables a small width and depth which allows space-savings in end systems. Due to the basic functionality and smart design of the PIANO power supplies, a lower number of components are required, all of which can be placed on a single printed circuit board. The high efficiency values (90.5 to 95.7% at full load) reduce heat losses, make the power supplies more durable and reduce energy costs for system cooling. 

The DC-OK signal - and a relay contact for remote monitoring facilitate maintenance and increase availability. The power supplies can withstand powerful input transients up to 230 % of the nominal input voltage. This electrical robustness is assured throughout the entire load range. 

Two product lines are offered, the PIANO PIM power supplies (PIM36, PIM60, PIM90) with AC input 100 – 240 V and DC output 24V 1.5 A, 2.5 A, 3.8 A and DC 12 V 5 A, output power 36 W, 60 W or 90 W in compact size with low power losses, even in standby (< 0.5 W), push-in or screw terminals, 60 W and 90 W NEC Class 2 versions. The PIANO PIC power supplies (PIC120, PIC240, PIC480) offer AC input 100 – 240 V or 200 – 240 V, DC output 24 V 5 A, 10 A, 20 A and 48 V 10 A, output power 120 W, 240 W or 480 W with high efficiency up to 95.7 %, outstanding reliability (MTBF) up to 1.72 million hours in light-weight, compact and very robust housing.
 

Efficient and safe management of industrial electrical systems plays a critical role in modern projects, with drawer panels and quarter drawer systems being at the forefront. These systems allow for organized placement of equipment and enable quick maintenance, providing flexibility and high safety for projects. Omega Energy Technologies offers the industry engineering expertise and an innovative approach to both systems.

Technical Infrastructure and Advantages 

Drawer panels, with their modular structure, ensure that electrical equipment is arranged in an organized manner. Each drawer is designed to manage an independent electrical circuit, allowing users easy access and quick maintenance. The separation between electrical components minimizes safety risks. And the modularity allows to add or change components within the system easily.

These panels have a wide range of applications, from industrial facilities to data centers. They are also preferred in building automation and energy distribution projects.
Quarter drawer systems offer more compact and space-saving solutions. These panels are designed so that each drawer occupies a quarter of the panel. They perform excellently in smaller projects, confined spaces, and simpler system needs. Due to their simple design and limited capacity, costs are kept to a minimum. Unlike larger, more complex structures, they offer great compatibility with fewer components and more compact designs.

Omega Panel is one of the industry leaders in providing the most innovative solutions for both drawer panels and quarter drawer systems. Our innovative approach in engineering, combined with years of experience, enables us to develop customized solutions for projects.