Gra­votech is an in­ter­na­tion­al man­u­fac­turer and mar­keter of en­grav­ing, mark­ing and trace­ab­il­ity solu­tions ad­dress­ing ap­plic­a­tions of per­son­al­iz­a­tion, iden­ti­fic­a­tion and sig­nage. Gra­votech’s product port­fo­lio in­cludes in­nov­at­ive and high per­form­ing mark­ing and en­grav­ing ma­chines based on laser and mech­an­ic­al tech­no­lo­gies, and a com­pre­hens­ive range of en­grav­ing ma­ter­i­als and con­sum­ables. Over the years, Gra­votech has be­come a key play­er and in­dus­tri­al part­ner for many ma­jor in­dus­tri­al cor­por­a­tions as well as lux­ury goods man­u­fac­tur­ers and re­tail­ers.

Arnaud Lin­quette, Pres­id­ent and CEO of Gra­votech said, “The sale of Gra­votech to a mar­ket lead­er in print­ing and high-per­form­ance ad­hes­ive ma­ter­i­al solu­tions provides us with an ex­cel­lent op­por­tun­ity to ex­pand in­to new mar­kets and gen­er­ate long-term prof­it­able growth. Over the past sev­er­al years, we have en­hanced our new product de­vel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies and broadened our port­fo­lio of pre­ci­sion dir­ect part mark­ing and en­grav­ing solu­tions. We look for­ward to fur­ther de­vel­op­ing and grow­ing our busi­ness with Brady.”

“We are pleased to wel­come the Gra­votech team to Brady,” said Brady’s Pres­id­ent and Chief Ex­ec­ut­ive Of­ficer, Rus­sell R. Shaller. “Gra­votech of­fers spe­cialty laser and mech­an­ic­al en­grav­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies in­ten­ded for dir­ect part mark­ing with­in a vari­ety of in­dus­tries and ap­plic­a­tions. The ad­di­tion of Gra­votech ex­pands our product of­fer­ing in­to pre­ci­sion dir­ect part mark­ing and en­grav­ing, which aligns with Brady’s mar­ket lead­ing po­s­i­tion in product iden­ti­fic­a­tion solu­tions and spe­cialty ad­hes­ive ma­ter­i­als. We in­tend to ex­pand Gra­votech’s ad­dress­able mar­ket util­iz­ing Brady’s glob­al foot­print throughout Europe, Asia and the Amer­icas.”

About Brady
Brady Cor­por­a­tion is an in­ter­na­tion­al man­u­fac­turer and mar­keter of com­plete solu­tions that identi­fy and pro­tect people, products and places. Brady’s products help cus­tom­ers in­crease safety, se­cur­ity, pro­ductiv­ity and per­form­ance and in­clude high-per­form­ance la­bels, signs, safety devices, print­ing sys­tems and soft­ware. Foun­ded in 1914, Brady has a di­verse cus­tom­er base in elec­tron­ics, tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions, man­u­fac­tur­ing, elec­tric­al, con­struc­tion, med­ic­al, aerospace and a vari­ety of oth­er in­dus­tries. Brady is headquartered in Mil­wau­kee, Wis­con­sin and as of Ju­ly 31, 2023, em­ployed ap­prox­im­ately 5,600 people in its world­wide busi­nesses. Brady’s fisc­al 2023 sales were ap­prox­im­ately $1.33 bil­lion.
 

The PROFINET spe­cific­a­tion is con­tinu­ally be­ing fur­ther de­veloped based on cus­tom­er re­quire­ments. Fol­low­ing its an­nu­al pub­lic­a­tion sched­ule, PI (PROFIB­US & PROFINET In­ter­na­tion­al) re­cently re­leased the V2.4 MU5 spe­cific­a­tion fol­low­ing ex­tens­ive re­view. This ver­sion in­cludes com­pre­hens­ive se­cur­ity defin­i­tions for PROFINET Se­cur­ity Classes 2 and 3. At the same time, the GSDML and cer­ti­fic­a­tion are also be­ing con­tinu­ally fur­ther de­veloped. This is cre­at­ing a sol­id basis for de­velopers and is en­sur­ing the safety, se­cur­ity and re­li­ab­il­ity of PROFINET net­works.

Im­ple­ment­a­tion for pro­cess in­dus­tries

PROFINET was in­ten­tion­ally de­veloped for the broad­er mar­ket and is be­ing used in a vari­ety of in­dus­tries. As the first avail­able im­ple­ment­a­tion of Eth­er­net APL, PROFINET over APL is ad­van­cing growth in pro­cess auto­ma­tion. It’s also es­tab­lished in the high-end range of mo­tion con­trol. Tried-and-tested IRT tech­no­logy is avail­able in an ever-in­creas­ing num­ber of drives. At the same time, PROFINET is pre­par­ing steps for TSN (Time-Sens­it­ive Net­work­ing) so it can meet the re­quire­ments of the fu­ture. PROFINET’s ar­chi­tec­ture is per­fectly suited to­wards the re­quire­ments of the di­git­al trans­form­a­tion. On the one hand, easy data ac­cess is pos­sible through an open TCP/IP chan­nel or an in­teg­rated PN_Record_Rd/Rw. PROFINET mod­els have been mapped to OPC UA in the mean­time as well.

PROFINET is a cent­ral com­pon­ent of the PI eco­sys­tem. Both tech­nic­ally and or­gan­iz­a­tion­ally, there’s close co­ordin­a­tion with oth­er tech­no­lo­gies, such as IO-Link, SRCI, om­lox, MTP and NOA. Over 800 com­mit­ted mem­bers are act­ive in work­ing groups, in­tens­ively grap­pling with cus­tom­er re­quire­ments. This close co­oper­a­tion en­ables the seam­less in­teg­ra­tion of PROFINET in­to the over­all auto­ma­tion en­vir­on­ment. De­velopers and users alike be­ne­fit from a broad spec­trum of solu­tions and a strong com­munity which ad­vances the fur­ther de­vel­op­ment and suc­cess of PROFINET.

The de­tails of the study can be ob­tained dir­ectly from Om­dia. 
 

Sus­tain­ab­il­ity lies at the heart of Schneider Elec­tric’s mis­sion. The com­pany em­ploys mul­ti­fa­ceted strategies to pro­mote a sus­tain­able world. One key ap­proach in­volves as­sist­ing cus­tom­ers in re­du­cing en­ergy con­sump­tion while max­im­iz­ing the im­pact of the en­ergy they use. As a trail­blazer in the trans­ition to a clean­er and more equit­able in­dustry, Schneider Elec­tric’s sig­ni­fic­ant con­tri­bu­tions to car­bon emis­sions re­duc­tion are pub­licly dis­closed every quarter.

Vari­able Speed Drives and Car­bon Emis­sions Re­duc­tion 

Jean-Louis Guil­lou, VP Drives - In­dus­tri­al Con­trol & Drives, high­lights the re­mark­able im­pact of Vari­able Speed Drive. Cur­rently, 42% of the total avoided car­bon emis­sions in the Schneider Elec­tric car­bon emis­sion re­port can be at­trib­uted to Vari­able Speed Drives and the more ef­fi­cient util­iz­a­tion of elec­tric­al mo­tors—an achieve­ment that Jean-Louis de­scribes as “ab­so­lutely fant­ast­ic.”

En­han­cing Mo­tor Per­form­ance with Smart Drives 

Jean-Louis Guil­lou ob­serves that the trends in drives align with broad­er in­dustry shifts. In­tel­li­gence is in­creas­ingly em­bed­ded in products, and with each new drive gen­er­a­tion, pro­cessing power doubles — a de­lib­er­ate ef­fort to im­prove mon­it­or­ing and con­trol to fur­ther im­prove over­all ef­fi­ciency. To achieve op­tim­al mo­tor per­form­ance, con­tinu­ous mon­it­or­ing and ad­just­ment are cru­cial. This ne­ces­sit­ates smart auto­ma­tion equip­ment that can be in­tel­li­gently con­trolled. In cer­tain in­dus­tries, up to 50% of total en­ergy con­sump­tion is at­trib­uted to elec­tric­al mo­tors. By em­ploy­ing smart drives to reg­u­late these mo­tors, en­ergy con­sump­tion can be re­duced by up to 20%, as ex­plained by Jean-Louis Guil­lou.

A 20-Year Part­ner­ship

Schneider Elec­tric and HMS Net­works have main­tained a stra­tegic part­ner­ship for two dec­ades. Dur­ing this time, HMS Net­works has been in­stru­ment­al in de­vel­op­ing net­work con­nectiv­ity solu­tions for Schneider Elec­tric’s pop­u­lar vari­able speed drives, en­abling seam­less con­nectiv­ity to in­dus­tri­al con­trol net­works. These net­works span vari­ous pro­to­cols, in­clud­ing PROFINET, Eth­er­Net/IP, Eth­er­CAT, Mod­bus TCP, and more. The col­lab­or­a­tion between Schneider and HMS Net­works has been es­sen­tial in achiev­ing a solu­tion for sup­port­ing mul­tiple in­dus­tri­al com­mu­nic­a­tion pro­to­cols.
HMS Net­works plays a cru­cial role in ad­van­cing di­git­al­iz­a­tion with­in the in­dustry. Their com­mu­nic­a­tion in­ter­faces sup­port a wide range of in­dus­tri­al net­work pro­to­cols, en­abling man­u­fac­tur­ers of in­dus­tri­al equip­ment to seam­lessly con­nect to any type of net­work without the bur­den of in-house de­vel­op­ment and main­ten­ance. By part­ner­ing with HMS Net­works, com­pan­ies like Schneider Elec­tric can of­fer their cus­tom­ers world-class and re­li­able net­work con­nectiv­ity.

Con­nectiv­ity: A Vi­tal Re­quire­ment for Ef­fi­ciency and Sus­tain­ab­il­ity 

As the world moves to­ward great­er ef­fi­ciency and sus­tain­ab­il­ity, di­git­al­iz­a­tion is be­com­ing ubi­quit­ous. Con­nectiv­ity is no longer a lux­ury—it’s a ne­ces­sity. In the fu­ture, everything will be in­ter­con­nec­ted. Schneider Elec­tric and HMS Net­works share a vis­ion of con­tin­ued col­lab­or­a­tion to drive this trans­form­a­tion for­ward. Jean-Louis Guil­lou, Vice Pres­id­ent for Schneider Drives di­vi­sion, sums it up: “Di­git­al­iz­a­tion is hap­pen­ing all around us. Con­nectiv­ity isn’t just nice to have; it’s an es­sen­tial re­quire­ment. Let’s con­tin­ue work­ing to­geth­er to shape a con­nec­ted and sus­tain­able fu­ture.”
 

After more than 25 years with SCHURTER, Rolf Hausheer will re­tire at the end of 2024. His ca­reer at SCHURTER began in April 1999 as Head of Pro­cure­ment. His stra­tegic de­cisions and his abil­ity to build valu­able sup­pli­er re­la­tion­ships con­trib­uted sig­ni­fic­antly to the ef­fi­ciency and ef­fect­ive­ness of pro­cure­ment. In 2009, Rolf Hausheer was ap­poin­ted to the man­age­ment team with re­spons­ib­il­ity for Sup­ply Chain Man­age­ment, in­clud­ing Sourcing, Cus­tom­er Ser­vice and Ware­house. Since Feb­ru­ary 2024, Rolf Hausheer has been lead­ing SCHURTER AG as MD ad in­ter­im. Des­pite the ad­di­tion­al re­spons­ib­il­ity as MD, he re­tained the lead­er­ship of Sup­ply Chain Man­age­ment and sup­por­ted the stra­tegic dir­ec­tion of the com­pany as Co-Pro­gram Man­age­ment Of­ficer.

New Role Dis­tri­bu­tion

Stef­fen Lind­ner has taken over the role of Man­aging Dir­ect­or of SCHURTER AG on 1 Ju­ly. He already man­ages the SCHURTER sub­si­di­ary in Ger­many and over­sees all com­pany activ­it­ies in EMEA, in­clud­ing product man­age­ment, en­gin­eer­ing, sales and pro­duc­tion. With his proven lead­er­ship skills and in­ter­na­tion­al ex­per­i­ence, Stef­fen Lind­ner is ideally suited to achieve SCHURTER's goals. At the same time, the re­spons­ib­il­ity for Sup­ply Chain Man­age­ment has been trans­ferred to Os­wald Fiegl, the act­ing COO. Rolf Hausheer will now fo­cus on or­gan­isa­tion­al projects with­in the com­pany's strategy, where he can ef­fect­ively ap­ply his ex­tens­ive busi­ness ex­per­i­ence.
 

The PI In­nov­a­tion Award was cre­ated by Physik In­stru­mente (PI), a high-tech com­pany based in Baden-Württemberg, Ger­many. “For more than fifty years, PI stands for in­nov­a­tions that make the seem­ingly im­possible pos­sible. This was our mo­tiv­a­tion and in­spir­a­tion to cre­ate such an award,” ex­plains Markus Span­ner, CEO of the PI Group. The award re­cog­nizes out­stand­ing doc­tor­al theses with ex­cep­tion­al in­nov­a­tion po­ten­tial, pla­cing a spe­cial em­phas­is on the best pos­sible know­ledge trans­fer—from re­search to suc­cess­ful ap­plic­a­tion in prac­tice. “The prac­tic­al ap­plic­a­tion goes hand in hand with the high med­ic­al rel­ev­ance of the work. This is ex­actly what con­vinced us,” says the jury, con­sist­ing of a pan­el of pro­fess­ors from the fac­ulty and Dr. Stef­fen Schreiber, Dir­ect­or Glob­al In­nov­a­tion & Scout­ing at PI, in its state­ment. 

“We see the PI In­nov­a­tion Award as ad­di­tion­al mo­tiv­a­tion for our stu­dents, for which we are very grate­ful. This year, the award re­cog­nizes a thes­is whose prac­tic­al rel­ev­ance has already led to the found­ing of a pub­licly fun­ded start-up com­pany. We warmly con­grat­u­late the win­ner, Dr. Teresa Wag­n­er,” said a de­lighted Prof. Dr. Thilo Stehle, Dean of the Fac­ulty of Sci­ence.

In the thes­is en­titled “Two Birds with One Stone: Ther­anost­ic Ap­plic­a­tions of Nanobod­ies”, Dr. Wag­n­er de­scribes the man­u­fac­tur­ing, char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion, and ap­plic­a­tion of nanobod­ies as ther­anost­ic tools that can be used for both dia­gnost­ic and thera­peut­ic ap­plic­a­tions in the con­text of pre­ci­sion medi­cine. A total of four­teen doc­tor­al theses were sub­mit­ted for the award.
 

Based in Porto, Por­tugal, FALL SAFE® is pro­du­cer of crit­ic­al-use per­son­al pro­tect­ive equip­ment, spe­cial­iz­ing in fall pro­tec­tion equip­ment and sys­tems. Since 2003, the com­pany has been re­cog­nized as a cat­egory lead­er and in­nov­at­or of highly tech­nic­al and func­tion­al safety products for di­verse end mar­kets. FALL SAFE® designs and man­u­fac­tures a wide vari­ety of fall pro­tec­tion safety products in­clud­ing har­nesses, self-re­tract­ing life­lines (SRL’s), des­cend­ers, belts, an­chors, ropes, life­lines as well as oth­er tech­nic­al fall pro­tec­tion products in­clud­ing vari­ous safety ac­cessor­ies. FALL SAFE® con­tin­ues to lead through in­nov­a­tion, with the sole pur­pose of keep­ing work­ers safe and pro­tect­ing the lives of count­less pro­fes­sion­als work­ing at heights around the globe. As part of the trans­ac­tion, FALL SAFE® TRAIN­ING, a fully cer­ti­fied train­ing fa­cil­ity, helps to train work­ers at heights from around the globe.

“Adding FALL SAFE to our grow­ing, world-class port­fo­lio of SureW­erx brands moves us fur­ther to­ward our goal of be­com­ing the glob­al lead­er in Safety and Pro­ductiv­ity,” said SureW­erx CEO, Chris Baby. “FALL SAFE brings us one step closer to build­ing a ro­bust and in­nov­at­ive Fall Pro­tec­tion port­fo­lio as part of the SureW­erx plat­form. FALL SAFE’s ex­pert­ise in the most tech­nic­al and de­mand­ing por­tion of the Fall Pro­tec­tion mar­ket around the globe sets them apart from their com­pet­i­tion. We are thrilled to be adding this highly re­spec­ted brand to our mar­ket-lead­ing port­fo­lio of best-in-class safety products.”  

“FALL SAFE has al­ways fo­cused on de­liv­er­ing in­nov­at­ive, per­form­ance-driv­en products and solu­tions to end users through its dis­tri­bu­tion part­ners,” said FALL SAFE Founders, Jan and Paula Ek­man. “We are thrilled to be part­ner­ing with SureW­erx, a com­pany that holds the same val­ues and com­mit­ment to work­er safety as FALL SAFE. Their reach in­to the glob­al in­dus­tri­al mar­kets and ac­cess to over 4,000 dis­trib­ut­ors across mul­tiple chan­nels will un­doubtedly ac­cel­er­ate growth of the FALL SAFE brand.”
 

IEN Europe: Dr. Büchsner, the Sta­bilus Group has just com­pleted the ac­quis­i­tion of Destaco. What do you ex­pect from this in­vest­ment?
Dr. Büchsner: Both im­me­di­ate and long-term ef­fects. We’ll now be able to serve the mar­ket with a con­sid­er­ably broad­er line-up of products and com­pre­hens­ive sys­tem solu­tions. Fur­ther­more, Destaco is an­oth­er com­pon­ent of our strategy for the fu­ture. In our Strategy 2030, we’ve set clear goals for how we want to shape the mo­tion con­trol mar­ket. In ad­di­tion to or­gan­ic growth, we’ll con­tin­ue to look out for po­ten­tial ac­quis­i­tions that make a good fit with our com­pany. 

IEN Europe: Let’s fo­cus first on the ad­ded value for your cus­tom­ers. Who can be­ne­fit from your com­bined port­fo­lio – and how?
Dr. Büchsner: Our products and solu­tions are ideal for a wide range of man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pan­ies. Since the pan­dem­ic, we’ve seen that more and more com­pan­ies are shift­ing their pro­duc­tion back from emer­ging mar­kets to in­dus­tri­al­ized coun­tries. Due to the high­er pro­duc­tion costs and a de­cline in qual­i­fied work­force, com­pan­ies are ne­ces­sar­ily look­ing to in­crease their use of ro­bot­ics and auto­ma­tion, which have since emerged as genu­ine mega­trends. 

With our com­bined port­fo­lio, we can now of­fer these com­pan­ies at­tract­ive and com­pet­it­ive solu­tions for all mo­tion con­trol tasks. While the products of the Sta­bilus Group are meant for con­trolled mo­tion se­quences and ex­act vi­bra­tion isol­a­tion, Destaco’s com­pon­ents – in­clud­ing power clamps, end-of-arm tools, and grip­pers – are used for ro­bot­ics and auto­ma­tion. Our cus­tom­ers can use all these solu­tions to boost their pro­ductiv­ity and build man­u­fac­tur­ing lines based on in­nov­at­ive tech­no­lo­gies. 

IEN Europe: Yes, but there’s no short­age of sup­pli­ers in the auto­ma­tion sec­tor. What’s spe­cial about Destaco?
Dr. Büchsner: Our ex­perts have stud­ied the mar­ket in­tens­ively. In Destaco, they found a high de­gree of align­ment with our own com­pany, much great­er than just a tech­no­lo­gic­al fit. Both part­ners have a long his­tory – Destaco was foun­ded in 1915, Sta­bilus in 1934 – and in both cases, this sta­bil­ity is paired with an abil­ity to con­tinu­ally in­nov­ate and gen­er­ate steady growth. Both com­pan­ies have close, long­time cus­tom­er re­la­tion­ships and es­tab­lished dis­tri­bu­tion net­works that com­ple­ment each oth­er ideally. The po­ten­tial to grow faster to­geth­er than alone is very high for both part­ners. And so we’re very pleased now that the ac­quis­i­tion has been fi­nal­ized after the pur­chase agree­ment was signed on Oc­to­ber 11, 2023 and the au­thor­it­ies gran­ted the ne­ces­sary ap­provals. 

IEN Europe: How have the man­age­ment and staff re­acted to the change?
Dr. Büchsner: Pos­it­ively. We made it clear from the be­gin­ning that we want to de­vel­op Destaco fur­ther. The Destaco brand, with which the com­pany’s em­ploy­ees identi­fy to a great de­gree, will be re­tained as an in­de­pend­ent ex­pert brand un­der the roof of the Sta­bilus Group; the same goes for its product port­fo­lio, which we want to com­bine with our own very soon so that we can of­fer our cus­tom­ers a com­plete range of products and solu­tions. And of course, we’ll con­tin­ue to provide a com­par­able level of em­ploy­ee be­ne­fits to our new col­leagues, in­clud­ing the dif­fer­ent glob­al 401(k) plans – based on the US mod­el – without in­ter­rup­tion. And we are very happy that Stefan Eggers will con­tin­ue to serve as Destaco’s CEO.
 
As for our own em­ploy­ees with­in the Sta­bilus Group, we can as­sure them that there will be no over­laps or re­dund­an­cies in the port­fo­lio and there­fore no jobs are threatened by the ac­quis­i­tion. On the con­trary, we ex­pect to con­tin­ue on a sus­tained growth course un­der our STAR 2030 strategy. Destaco will now be a part of that. Fur­ther­more, our sound fin­ances give us the fin­an­cial flex­ib­il­ity to con­tin­ue grow­ing our core busi­ness in a tar­geted man­ner.

IEN Europe: How will the co­oper­a­tion between Sta­bilus and Destaco de­vel­op in the near fu­ture and when will it be­come vis­ible?
Dr. Büchsner: Destaco is now also an im­port­ant ex­pert brand with­in the Sta­bilus Group, like 5 oth­er brands that already be­long to the Group in the in­dus­tri­al sec­tor. 
It is im­port­ant, as I have already men­tioned, that the Destaco brand re­mains the same strong brand to­geth­er with its product lines such as Robo­hand or Camco. Just like all the oth­er in­dus­tri­al brands of the Sta­bilus Group. 

The be­ne­fits of the in­teg­rated of­fer­ing will be felt by our cus­tom­ers, es­pe­cially on the sales side. For ex­ample, we ex­pect the first joint auto­ma­tion trade fairs for Destaco and our ex­pert brand ACE to take place from Oc­to­ber this year.

IEN Europe: You men­tioned your strategy STAR 2030. What is that, ex­actly, and what role does the ac­quis­i­tion of Destaco play in it?
Dr. Büchsner: With STAR 2030, we want to shape the fu­ture from a strong po­s­i­tion. One of the most press­ing stra­tegic goals is to ex­pand our in­dus­tri­al busi­ness – our second most im­port­ant seg­ment after the auto­mot­ive busi­ness – through con­tinu­ous growth and po­s­i­tion our com­pany as a solu­tions pro­vider to an even great­er de­gree. Destaco’s ex­pert­ise and cap­ab­il­it­ies will play an im­port­ant role in this en­deavor. They too are part of our fu­ture mo­tion con­trol eco­sys­tem, with which we want to achieve our vis­ion of be­ing the world mar­ket lead­er in smart mo­tion con­trol tech­no­lo­gies by 2030. We’ve com­mu­nic­ated the sub­stant­ive ele­ments of STAR 2030 to our em­ploy­ees in de­tail since it was ad­op­ted in Ju­ly 2022. And it’s plain to see that they are “liv­ing” our vis­ion and strategy every day. 

IEN Europe: Are you plan­ning fur­ther ac­quis­i­tions to achieve your goals, or are you sat­is­fied with the cur­rent set-up of the Sta­bilus Group?
Dr. Büchsner: Since 2016, we’ve pur­sued a strategy of sup­port­ing and ac­cel­er­at­ing our or­gan­ic growth with ex­tern­al ac­quis­i­tions. The suc­cess­ful in­teg­ra­tion of our ex­pert brands proves that this strategy has been suc­cess­ful. That be­ing said, we op­er­ate in a dy­nam­ic mar­ket in which chances to real­ize at­tract­ive syn­er­gies could present them­selves in the fu­ture. We will ana­lyze such chances care­fully. And so we do not wish to rule out fur­ther, well-reasoned ac­quis­i­tions to fur­ther ex­tend the Sta­bilus Group’s mar­ket po­s­i­tion.

IEN Europe: Thank you very much for your time, Dr. Büchsner.
 

Ac­cord­ing to the Ger­man Par­cel and Ex­press Lo­gist­ics As­so­ci­ation (Bundes­verb­and Paket und Ex­press­lo­gistik e. V.), 4.15 bil­lion cour­i­er, ex­press and par­cel ship­ments were sent in Ger­many alone in 2022. An­nu­al ship­ment growth to around 4.9 bil­lion is real­ist­ic by 2027. Against this back­drop and the gen­er­ally pre­vail­ing short­age of per­son­nel, there is only one solu­tion for ship­ping and lo­gist­ics com­pan­ies to cope with this im­mense volume of or­ders: in­creased auto­ma­tion. The glob­al ro­bot­ic in­teg­rat­or AWL of­fers RODE, an in­tel­li­gent ro­bot­ic de­pal­let­iser solu­tion. One of the loc­a­tions where RODE adds value is for DHL eCo­m­merce in Rot­ter­dam. In this ma­chine, two En­senso 3D cam­er­as from IDS Ima­ging De­vel­op­ment Sys­tems GmbH are im­ple­men­ted to provide the re­quired im­age data.

The in­tel­li­gent ro­bot-sup­por­ted de­pal­let­iser, there­fore, auto­mat­ic­ally destacks any pack­aged goods such as car­tons, bags or con­tain­ers from pal­lets and thus en­sures their con­tinu­ous pro­cessing - without delays or down­time. Even "ex­tra shifts" at peak times can be im­ple­men­ted at any time, e.g., to cope with the in­creased work­load dur­ing Christ­mas. This frees up staff for more qual­i­fied tasks, such as the sub­sequent pro­cessing of con­sign­ments or hand­ling cus­tom­er in­quir­ies. At the same time, it re­lieves em­ploy­ees of phys­ic­ally and er­go­nom­ic­ally de­mand­ing tasks and re­duces the risk of in­jury.

Up to 800 pack­ages in con­tinu­ous op­er­a­tion

At DHL eCo­m­merce in Rot­ter­dam, RODE pro­cesses up to 800 par­cels per hour with a max­im­um weight of 31.5 kg each and places them on the cor­res­pond­ing sort­ing belt. The par­tic­u­lar dif­fi­culty here lies in the ro­bot's pick­ing of par­cels of dif­fer­ent sizes and weights. It must in­de­pend­ently re­cog­nize the po­s­i­tion of the ob­jects in three-di­men­sion­al space and de­cide which pack­age to pick next. It then has to de­term­ine the best grip­ping po­s­i­tion and avoid col­li­sion with oth­er par­cels or the ma­chine.

"This in­tel­li­gent ro­bot­ic solu­tion in­teg­rates AI im­age pro­cessing and high-tech grip­per tech­no­logy. The sys­tem re­cog­nises products and can flip the items to en­sure that the re­quired long side is lead­ing," ex­plains Sander Lensen, R&D Man­ager at AWL. Two En­senso X36 3D cam­er­as provide the ne­ces­sary im­age data. They are able to provide ro­bust 2D and 3D in­form­a­tion on products on a pal­let meas­ur­ing 1200 x 1200 mm and a max­im­um height of 2400 mm. The in­teg­rated im­age pro­cessing sys­tem pro­cesses this fur­ther and en­ables the de­pal­let­iser to identi­fy each in­di­vidu­al pack­age and de­term­ine the cor­res­pond­ing grip­ping po­s­i­tion - for ro­bust ro­bot-as­sisted pick­ing.

3D cam­er­as for fu­ture-ori­ented ro­bot­ics

Each En­senso X36 3D cam­era sys­tem con­sists of a pro­ject­or unit and two GigE cam­er­as with either 1.6 MP or 5 MP CMOS sensors. AWL has op­ted for the 5 MP vari­ant for its solu­tion. Mount­ing and ad­just­ment brack­ets, three lenses as well as sync and patch cables for con­nect­ing the cam­er­as to the pro­ject­or unit are also in­cluded in the scope of de­liv­ery. The in­teg­rated FlexView2 tech­no­logy en­sures an even bet­ter spa­tial res­ol­u­tion as well as a very high ro­bust­ness of the sys­tem with dark or re­flect­ive sur­faces. The 3D sys­tems are de­livered as­sembled and pre-cal­ib­rated. However, fo­cus­sing and cal­ib­ra­tion is also easy to set up us­ing the setup wiz­ard in­teg­rated in the soft­ware. The lat­ter they have in com­mon with the RODE de­pal­let­iser - it is also easy to in­teg­rate in­to its work­ing en­vir­on­ment and aims to give its users a com­pet­it­ive edge in the world of lo­gist­ics auto­ma­tion.

Out­look

"The in­t­ra­lo­gist­ics mar­ket is a growth mar­ket. The num­ber of ro­bot solu­tions re­quired will in­crease rap­idly in the com­ing years. The type of products that need to be re­cog­nised will change con­stantly. This will be a chal­lenge for all com­pon­ents and the de­mands on the cam­era," ex­plains Sander Lensen. However, im­age pro­cessing is also de­vel­op­ing rap­idly. Smart solu­tions that com­bine cam­era tech­no­logy with ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence are on the rise. They hold great po­ten­tial for tack­ling both in­creas­ingly de­mand­ing tasks and the worsen­ing short­age of skilled work­ers. Car­ton by car­ton, par­cel by par­cel, pal­let by pal­let.
 

Moxa an­nounced its new MRX Series Lay­er 3 rack­mount Eth­er­net switches that sup­port 64 ports with up to 16 ports of 10GbE speed to ac­cel­er­ate data ag­greg­a­tion for in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions and help users build high-band­width net­work in­fra­struc­ture to real­ize IT/OT con­ver­gence. 

Eth­er­net Switches for high-band­width in­dus­tri­al net­works

The rising num­ber of con­nec­ted devices and in­creas­ing ad­op­tion of data-in­tens­ive ap­plic­a­tions like video data trans­mis­sion are boost­ing the re­quire­ment for high-band­width net­works. Video sur­veil­lance and AI-ori­ented ap­plic­a­tions with ul­tra-high defin­i­tion (UHD) videos are ex­amples of these de­mands. Fur­ther­more, the ana­lyt­ic needs for more in­tel­li­gent ap­plic­a­tions for busi­ness in­nov­a­tion also make the MRX-Q4064/G4064 Series ideal Eth­er­net switches for hand­ling high-band­width trans­mis­sion re­quire­ments. 

Re­dund­ant net­work paths

The MRX-Q4064/G4064 Series com­bines im­press­ive switch­ing per­form­ance with a soph­ist­ic­ated ex­ter­i­or and is the win­ner of the Red Dot Product Design 2024 award. The rack­mount Eth­er­net switches of­fer in­dustry-lead­ing 16 and 8 10GbE ports, re­spect­ively, ag­greg­at­ing large-scale data trans­mis­sions. In ad­di­tion, the port trunk­ing fea­tures al­low group­ing up to eight 10GbE ports in­to a single 80 Gbps link to max­im­ize trans­mis­sion band­width. The MRX-Q4064/G4064 Series de­liv­ers both sys­tem and net­work re­li­ab­il­ity. Con­tinu­ous sys­tem op­er­a­tion re­lies on stable op­er­at­ing tem­per­at­ures and power sup­plies. In­tel­li­gent tem­per­at­ure con­trol func­tions, 8 fan mod­ules, and dual power sup­ply mod­ules en­sure MRX-Q4064/G4064 Series up­time and sta­bil­ity. Moxa’s Turbo Ring and High-avail­ab­il­ity Stat­ic Trunk (HAST) tech­no­lo­gies provide re­dund­ant net­work paths and con­nectiv­ity to achieve high avail­ab­il­ity for large-scale net­work in­fra­struc­ture.

The MRX-Q4064/G4064 Series was de­veloped to sim­pli­fy de­ploy­ment and main­ten­ance for en­gin­eers. The mod­u­lar design of its Eth­er­net in­ter­faces, power sup­plies, and fans tre­mend­ously in­creases de­ploy­ment flex­ib­il­ity. The rack­mount Eth­er­net switches have built-in LCD Mod­ules (LCMs), al­low­ing en­gin­eers to check device status and quickly troubleshoot. Hot-swap­pable mod­u­lar­ity em­powers mod­ule swaps without af­fect­ing op­er­a­tions.
 

Touch­Netix is proud to an­nounce a ground­break­ing new touch/force but­ton-en­abling solu­tion - Tacto­Sense. Tacto­Sense en­ables com­bin­a­tions of touch and force sens­ing, along­side haptic trig­ger­ing, and LED feed­back. This is all eas­ily fa­cil­it­ated by aX­iom’s single chip tech­no­logy. The aX­iom tech­no­logy is a Toch­Netix de­vel­op­ment. With its unique si­nus­oid­al Tx drive, it de­liv­ers up to 80dB of SNR, >100 times the SNR you’d ex­pect from a tra­di­tion­al touch con­trol­ler. Us­ing this solu­tion, cus­tom­ers can in­teg­rate but­tons, but­ton bars, sliders, or joy­sticks with­in a vari­ety of smart sur­faces and ma­ter­i­als.

In­teg­ra­tion with­in a vari­ety of sur­faces

Fa­cil­it­ated by aX­iom’s pat­en­ted force sens­ing tech­no­logy, Tacto­Sense sup­ports up to 26 but­tons con­cur­rently and cus­tom­ers can eas­ily tune spe­cif­ic but­tons to be force and/or touch en­abled, in ad­di­tion to com­bin­a­tions of multi-touch, multi-force and hov­er de­tec­tion. Tacto­Sense of­fers ex­cit­ing op­por­tun­it­ies for cus­tom­ers to in­teg­rate tact­ile but­tons with a mech­an­ic­al feel, all without com­plic­ated in­teg­ra­tion or pro­hib­it­ive costs. This tech­no­logy can be in­teg­rated with­in a vari­ety of touch sur­face ma­ter­i­als, in­clud­ing plastic, leath­er­ette and even met­al, mak­ing it an at­tract­ive solu­tion for the auto­mot­ive, in­dus­tri­al and con­sumer sec­tors.  
Tacto­Sense Demo Kits are cur­rently avail­able for cus­tom­ers to ex­per­i­ence. 

The de­mands on mod­ern pro­duc­tion lines are enorm­ous: They need to be highly pro­duct­ive, op­tim­ally ef­fi­cient, easy to op­er­ate, and as flex­ible as pos­sible. However, the more that dif­fer­ent con­fig­ur­a­tions and tech­no­lo­gies are used and com­bined in man­u­fac­tur­ing, the more com­plex the work­ing en­vir­on­ment be­comes, both for the teams in pro­duc­tion and main­ten­ance and for op­er­a­tions man­age­ment and op­tim­iz­a­tion. It’s there­fore es­sen­tial that ma­chines and sys­tems sup­port people in mak­ing cor­rect de­cisions – in oth­er words, based on re­li­able data. At the core of the is­sue are two key ques­tions: What’s the ma­chine or sys­tem do­ing (right now)? And, what do I need to do now? The an­swers to these ques­tions are provided by plant or ma­chine visu­al­iz­a­tion that makes in­form­a­tion about the pro­cess and the status of the ma­chine ac­cess­ible and helps op­er­at­or teams make the right de­cisions. 

In­teg­ra­tion as a task for auto­ma­tion and visu­al­iz­a­tion

If there’s no cross-plant visu­al­iz­a­tion, com­pan­ies waste a lot of the po­ten­tial of their pro­cesses. When in­form­a­tion has to be la­bor­i­ously col­lec­ted and com­piled from dif­fer­ent sys­tems, er­rors and mis­in­ter­pret­a­tions can eas­ily oc­cur. In ad­di­tion, there’s a time delay in the op­er­at­ors’ re­ac­tions to changes in the pro­cess, and without a uni­form dia­gnos­is er­rors may be de­tec­ted too late. And last but not least, the teams need to be trained on the dif­fer­ent op­er­at­ing sys­tems and visu­al­iz­a­tions, which costs ex­tra time and money. All of these prob­lems can be avoided with user-cent­ric and uni­form visu­al­iz­a­tions for ma­chines and sys­tems, and even more ad­vant­ages can be real­ized along the en­tire ma­chine and plant li­fe­cycle.

Real­ize visu­al­iz­a­tions ef­fi­ciently with stand­ards

Even dur­ing the plan­ning phase, the right tech­no­lo­gies can lay the found­a­tion for a har­mo­ni­ous, scal­able visu­al­iz­a­tion. With the SIMAT­IC WinCC Uni­fied sys­tem, visu­al­iz­a­tions are en­gin­eered once and can then be used on both con­trol pan­els and op­er­at­ing PCs. The Simat­ic HMI Uni­fied Com­fort Pan­els can also meet in­creased re­quire­ments for hy­giene or en­vir­on­ment­al con­di­tions, so that a large num­ber of ap­plic­a­tions can be covered with a single sys­tem. Stand­ard­ized lib­rary ele­ments for pro­cess ob­jects can be used to en­sure that a valve type is al­ways dis­played in the same way in the visu­al­iz­a­tion and has the same func­tion­al­ity in op­er­a­tion. This makes it easi­er for users to find their way around the visu­al­iz­a­tion. An­oth­er ad­vant­age: With lib­rar­ies, de­vel­op­ment teams can cent­rally man­age and ver­sion ele­ments and in­ter­faces, which makes fu­ture ad­just­ments easi­er. In Simat­ic WinCC Uni­fied, the Tem­plate Suite also sup­ports project plan­ning as a design sys­tem: It con­tains ready-made tem­plates, im­ages, and ob­jects as the basis for your own HMI, which sig­ni­fic­antly sim­pli­fies and ac­cel­er­ates the de­vel­op­ment pro­cess.

Mod­u­lar man­u­fac­tur­ing con­cepts on the rise

Open­ness is im­port­ant not just at the ma­chine level but also at the plant level. In the phar­ma­ceut­ic­al and food in­dus­tries in par­tic­u­lar, there are ef­forts to re­place re­l­at­ively ri­gid pro­duc­tion lines with a mod­u­lar "pro­duc­tion ca­rou­sel" where ma­chines can be flex­ibly com­bined as pro­duc­tion is­lands or pro­duc­tion mod­ules. Of course, these "plug & pro­duce" con­cepts also re­quire cor­res­pond­ingly mod­u­lar, man­u­fac­turer-in­de­pend­ent con­cepts for auto­ma­tion and visu­al­iz­a­tion solu­tions. The found­a­tion is provided by the Mod­ule Type Pack­age (MTP), and Siemens of­fers the Simat­ic MTP Cre­at­or that can be used to cre­ate an MTP file from the TIA Portal. This file con­tains all the in­form­a­tion on PLC data and con­nec­tion as well as an ab­stract de­scrip­tion of the visu­al­iz­a­tion. From this de­scrip­tion, the con­fig­ur­a­tion is auto­mat­ic­ally gen­er­ated after the file has been read in dur­ing in­stan­ti­ation and the cor­res­pond­ing visu­al­iz­a­tion is gen­er­ated us­ing an ap­pro­pri­ate lib­rary. This is how the Simat­ic WinCC Uni­fied along with the Simat­ic MTP In­teg­rat­or cre­ates the con­nec­tion to the ma­chine via OPC UA, the PLC tags, and the HMI ele­ments auto­mat­ic­ally with a single click – even on ma­chines equipped with sys­tems from oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers.

More con­veni­ence for users

The res­ult is a uni­fied visu­al­iz­a­tion for the en­tire line or man­u­fac­tur­ing en­vir­on­ment – with little en­gin­eer­ing ef­fort for the OEM and little ef­fort for the in­teg­rat­or to or­ches­trate the pro­cess. In turn, plant op­er­at­ors be­ne­fit from sim­pler op­er­a­tion of their plant(s) with stand­ard­ized HMI in­ter­faces. There’s also less train­ing ef­fort, and op­er­at­ors can use their re­sources in op­er­a­tion and main­ten­ance more flex­ibly and ef­fi­ciently. In­nov­at­ive meth­ods of user iden­ti­fic­a­tion also make a con­tri­bu­tion: In ad­di­tion to iden­ti­fic­a­tion via pass­word-pro­tec­ted lo­gins and RFID tags, com­pan­ies can now use solu­tions in the in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ment that are already fa­mil­i­ar to their op­er­at­ing and main­ten­ance teams from their private lives. The Simat­ic WinCC Uni­fied Air app for An­droid and iOS uses bio­met­ric au­then­tic­a­tion of the end device and guides users through the lo­gin pro­cess at the Simat­ic HMI Uni­fied Com­fort Pan­el via Bluetooth.

Open to new ap­plic­a­tions and ideas

However, these in­nov­at­ive ap­plic­a­tions and func­tions aren’t just con­veni­ent, they also cru­cial of­fer bet­ter sup­port to op­er­at­ors in ma­chine setup. For ex­ample, the Itali­an ma­chine man­u­fac­turer Comi S.p.A. has used Simat­ic WinCC Uni­fied to make the con­fig­ur­a­tion of the pre­heat­ing bed of its ther­mo­form­ing ma­chines so in­tu­it­ive that the pro­duc­tion teams no longer need any spe­cial train­ing. The pro­cess is now auto­mat­ic­ally set up via a cus­tom Web con­trol cre­ated spe­cific­ally for this use case, and it’s been in­teg­rated dir­ectly in­to the op­er­at­or in­ter­face. There are sig­ni­fic­ant sav­ings for the plant op­er­at­or as well: The im­proved user guid­ance helps in­crease pro­ductiv­ity by up to 10 per­cent, re­duce cycle time, and achieve a bet­ter pro­cess qual­ity.

In Simat­ic WinCC Uni­fied, ex­ten­sions can also be im­ple­men­ted via script­ing: With the Simat­ic WinCC Uni­fied JS Con­nect­or, glob­al Java script mod­ules can be de­veloped in Visu­al Stu­dio Code, and the JavaS­cript source code can be ex­changed between Simat­ic WinCC Uni­fied ES and Visu­al Stu­dio Code. In ad­di­tion, the WinCC Uni­fied RT De­bug­ger can be used to ef­fi­ciently test scripts. Siemens is ad­dress­ing an­oth­er chal­lenge in ma­chine and plant en­gin­eer­ing: Over the next few years, many com­pan­ies will need to at­tract young tal­ents to the auto­ma­tion field, and gradu­ates will also want to ap­ply the high-level lan­guage skills they ac­quired dur­ing their stud­ies to this area.

Great­er trans­par­ency for pro­duc­tion and man­age­ment

IT and OT are also mer­ging in the field of visu­al­iz­a­tion in an­oth­er way. Web tech­no­lo­gies and se­cure in­ter­faces make it pos­sible for users to ac­cess sys­tem in­form­a­tion from a large num­ber of end devices via se­cure con­nec­tions: for ex­ample, via Web cli­ents and open in­ter­faces. With Simat­ic WinCC Uni­fied, users can use the GraphQL Serv­er to eas­ily query data from pro­duc­tion us­ing IT meth­ods, and con­versely to re­turn it just as eas­ily to pro­duc­tion to cre­ate in­di­vidu­al dash­boards. Us­ing In­dus­tri­al Edge, mod­ern tech­no­lo­gies for data ac­quis­i­tion and ana­lys­is can also be ret­ro­fit­ted dur­ing op­er­a­tion – and in­teg­rated just as seam­lessly in­to plant visu­al­iz­a­tion with ap­pro­pri­ate solu­tions. This is how the mer­ger of IT and OT en­sures great­er trans­par­ency in pro­duc­tion and al­lows op­er­at­ors and man­age­ment to al­ways keep an eye on their pro­cesses, even in a highly flex­ible, mod­u­lar, and ad­apt­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing en­vir­on­ment.
 

Fol­low­ing the launch of the CVGC car­bon va­cu­um grip­per for col­lab­or­at­ive ro­bots in 2019, CO­V­AL is now ready to launch its re­designed second gen­er­a­tion, based on feed­back from cus­tom­ers, in­teg­rat­ors, man­u­fac­tur­ers and op­er­at­ors. This new gen­er­a­tion also takes in­to ac­count cur­rent and fu­ture trends in the col­lab­or­at­ive ro­bot mar­ket: great­er ap­plic­a­tion di­versity, growth in the num­ber of man­u­fac­tur­ers, in­creased co-pres­ence with op­er­at­ors and hand­ling of heav­ier loads.

In­di­vidu­al con­fig­ur­a­tion 

In re­sponse to these changes, CO­V­AL has de­veloped a CVGC that is highly ver­sat­ile due to its mul­tiple con­fig­ur­a­tion op­tions. Each cus­tom­er can con­fig­ure "their" car­bon va­cu­um grip­per to ex­actly meet their re­quire­ments. It is avail­able in 3 sizes (240 x 120 mm, 320 x 160 mm, 350 x 250 mm), with 2 types of grip­ping in­ter­face (foam or suc­tion pad) and with or without an in­teg­rated va­cu­um gen­er­at­or.
The CVGC is avail­able with a choice of 3 mount­ing in­ter­faces and 6 con­nec­tion cables. This makes it per­fectly com­pat­ible with all ma­jor brands of co­bots.

Power and safety

The CVGC Car­bon va­cu­um grip­per is now equipped with a multi-stage pump, which means in­creased per­form­ance. It can handle heav­ier loads thanks to the light­ness of its car­bon struc­ture, which is 2.5 times light­er than steel and 6 times stronger. This meets a grow­ing de­mand from man­u­fac­tur­ers and con­trib­utes to the CVGC's ver­sat­il­ity.

As the CVGC is de­signed to work with op­er­at­ors, per­form­ing sep­ar­ate, sim­ul­tan­eous or al­tern­at­ing tasks, the va­cu­um grip­per is equipped with an edge guard made of flex­ible, res­ist­ant ma­ter­i­al to pro­tect the op­er­at­or in the event of con­tact.

For a wide range of ap­plic­a­tions

The vari­ous func­tions of the CVGC va­cu­um grip­per (dis­play, va­cu­um gen­er­at­or, vac­cuostat, si­len­cer, con­nect­ors, etc.) are housed in a case that pro­tects them from shocks and dam­age.

With its ul­tra-light va­cu­um grip­per, CO­V­AL can trans­form any col­lab­or­at­ive ro­bot in­to a tool for im­prov­ing pro­ductiv­ity and health in the work­place in a wide range of in­dus­tries: food pro­cessing, pack­aging, plastics pro­cessing, etc.
 

Emer­son launched the AVENTICS™ Series XV pneu­mat­ic valves de­signed with in­ter­op­er­ab­il­ity in mind to provide ma­chine build­ers across mul­tiple in­dus­tries and fact­ory auto­ma­tion ap­plic­a­tions with a flex­ible and cost-ef­fect­ive valve plat­form. 

Series XV valves provide high­er flow rates in a com­pact valve pack­age that en­ables more ef­fi­cient and flex­ible pneu­mat­ic sys­tem per­form­ance for fact­ory auto­ma­tion, auto­mot­ive and tire, and food and pack­aging ap­plic­a­tions. This helps man­u­fac­tur­ers boost pro­ductiv­ity and al­lows them to of­fer products cus­tom­ized for spe­cif­ic mar­kets and cus­tom­er pref­er­ences.

Wide range of op­tions 

Series XV valves in­clude the XV03, provid­ing flow volumes up to 350 liters per minute in nor­mal con­di­tions (NL/min), and the XV05, sched­uled for re­lease in Oc­to­ber 2024, provid­ing up to 880 NL/min. All valves in the Series XV line use proven AVENTICS core tech­no­logy and in­clude met­al threads, par­al­lel wir­ing, alu­min­um base plates and com­pact di­men­sions to make it easi­er to in­teg­rate in­to pro­duc­tion sys­tem designs. The series use con­sist­ent in­ter­faces and have wide con­nectiv­ity from single wir­ing over par­al­lel con­nec­tions such as D-SUB con­nect­ors. They also sup­port lead­ing field­bus pro­to­cols, in­clud­ing PROFINET®, Eth­er­net/IP, Eth­er­CAT, Power­link, Mod­bus TCP, IO-Link, AS-I, to sim­pli­fy in­teg­ra­tion in­to ma­chine con­trol net­works.
 

Wheel­chair ra­cing de­mands ex­cep­tion­al per­form­ance from ath­letes due to the high fric­tion gen­er­ated by con­stant hand-wheel con­tact. Tra­di­tion­al gloves of­ten fail to meet the stand­ards re­quired by ath­letes like Tatyana Mc­Fad­den, an 8-time Para­lympics Gold medal­list. Be­fore ad­opt­ing CRP USA’s solu­tion, Tatyana used stand­ard mould kits for her gloves, find­ing the qual­ity in­ad­equate. Con­ven­tion­al meth­ods struggled to pro­duce gloves that could with­stand the in­tense stress of wheel­chair ra­cing while main­tain­ing pre­ci­sion and com­fort.

Tatyana re­calls, “My first wheel­chair ra­cing gloves were called ‘har­ness gloves’. They were shaped like thumbs and made of heavy-duty fab­ric with rub­ber pad­ding. Their soft­ness made me feel the im­pact every time I hit the hand ring. By the 2008 Para­lympic Games, my team and I began mak­ing hard gloves. We would take plastic beads, melt them in a pot of boil­ing wa­ter, and then mould the plastic to my hands. This pro­cess took days to per­fect. Some­times we would have to start over and throw the whole plastic glove back in the wa­ter. Once per­fec­ted, I did not let the gloves out of my sight be­cause they would melt if left in the car or in the heat for too long. Over time, the plastic would wear down, so we made the gloves thick, but they were heavy.” Even these gloves were not up to Tatyana's needs for the highest sport­ing level.

In 2015, a sig­ni­fic­ant change oc­curred when Tatyana had the op­por­tun­ity to ex­per­i­ment with 3D-prin­ted gloves. In 2016, Tatyana con­nec­ted with CRP USA to con­tin­ue de­vel­op­ing 3D print­ing ra­cing gloves, aim­ing for them to be "stronger and more dur­able” com­pared to what they were us­ing in 2015. “After a friend of mine told me about CRP USA,” Tatyana adds, “I reached out to them and shared my story. I was so ex­cited when I met every­one in per­son. They are an in­cred­ible part­ner and have really helped me so much. Not just in their in­nov­a­tion but the con­fid­ence they gave me since I do not have to worry about the per­form­ance of my ra­cing gloves.” Tatyana ex­plained that the CRP USA team helped bring her vis­ion for the cur­rent gloves to life, mak­ing the vis­ion a real­ity.

Dur­ab­il­ity in dif­fer­ent con­di­tions

Strength and dur­ab­il­ity were un­doubtedly im­port­ant char­ac­ter­ist­ics that Tatyana re­quired from CRP USA to com­pete at her best, but they were not the only ones. Light­ness, stiff­ness, res­ist­ance to wear and tear, and res­ist­ance to weath­er were oth­er im­port­ant fea­tures Tatyana wanted for her new gloves. “When I met with the CRP USA team,” she spe­cifies, “we also talked about heat, rub­ber, weath­er ef­fects, and straps for the gloves so they can stay in my hands bet­ter. When com­pet­ing out­side, we face vari­ous weath­er con­di­tions, and I want to be ready for any­thing. My gloves have cracked in the past. My strokes pro­duce a lot of force when I hit the hand ring, and my pre­vi­ous gloves las­ted less than a year. I also wanted a bet­ter way to add rub­ber to the hand rings. The CRP USA team listened to my needs and man­aged to sat­is­fy them in the best pos­sible way.”

Be­fore the con­struc­tion of the parts, dis­cus­sions with cus­tom­ers are es­sen­tial to un­der­stand their needs in or­der to sat­is­fy them as best as pos­sible. After sev­er­al meet­ings with Tatyana, the CRP USA team op­ted for Laser Sin­ter­ing tech­no­logy and Wind­form XT 2.0 as the man­u­fac­tur­ing ma­ter­i­al. This solu­tion was se­lec­ted as the best one to ad­dress Tatyana's every­day chal­lenges. In this spe­cif­ic case, the rub­ber used in the 3D prin­ted gloves is a stand­ard off-the-shelf item. The CRP USA team trims it to size and bonds it to the gloves us­ing a struc­tur­al ad­hes­ive. This op­er­a­tion demon­strates the high pro­fes­sion­al­ism of the CRP USA team and the com­pat­ib­il­ity of Wind­form XT 2.0 with vari­ous com­pon­ents, en­sur­ing seam­less bond­ing without any is­sues.

Nath­an “Nate” Baker, Seni­or Project Co­ordin­at­or at CRP USA, ex­plains, “Throughout her ca­reer, Tatyana found that the qual­ity and de­tail of her gloves were just not up to the high stand­ard she needed. That's when the Wind­form range of com­pos­ites for 3D print­ing, cre­ated by our Itali­an part­ner CRP Tech­no­logy, came in­to play. At CRP USA, we have tried sev­er­al dif­fer­ent Wind­form ma­ter­i­als for her, with the gold stand­ard be­com­ing Wind­form XT 2.0.”

Wind­form XT 2.0 is known for its su­per­i­or mech­an­ic­al prop­er­ties. These prop­er­ties en­sured the gloves could with­stand the con­stant, high-fric­tion en­vir­on­ment of wheel­chair ra­cing without de­teri­or­a­tion. This dur­ab­il­ity sig­ni­fic­antly ex­ten­ded the lifespan of the gloves com­pared to tra­di­tion­al ma­ter­i­als. Ad­di­tion­ally, the flex­ib­il­ity and shock-ab­sorb­ing prop­er­ties of Wind­form XT 2.0 en­sured max­im­um com­fort, al­low­ing Tatyana to fo­cus solely on her per­form­ance without dis­com­fort or dis­trac­tion. 

High qual­ity with po­ten­tial for fu­ture im­prove­ment

CRP USA hol­lowed the parts out and in­ser­ted an in­tern­al struc­tur­ing. This al­lowed a re­duc­tion in the weight of the gloves while main­tain­ing strength, in­teg­rity, and im­prov­ing dur­ab­il­ity. This was a sig­ni­fic­ant con­tri­bu­tion to Tatyana's agil­ity and speed dur­ing races. The weight re­duc­tion was in­deed sub­stan­tial, with the res­ult­ing 3D prin­ted gloves in Wind­form XT 2.0 weigh­ing ap­prox­im­ately 100 grams, a 50% re­duc­tion from tra­di­tion­al gloves. Once com­pleted, the 3D prin­ted wheel­chair ra­cing gloves in Wind­form XT 2.0 un­der­went test­ing for weight and dur­ab­il­ity, and the res­ults were ex­cel­lent. Tatyana was very sat­is­fied with the out­come: “I re­mem­ber us­ing the gloves in Wind­form XT 2.0 for the very first time on the track and on the road," she says. "I was so im­pressed by how light and dur­able they were. My hands felt so light, it felt like I wasn't hold­ing onto any­thing. When I first put my hands in­to the glove, it was so smooth. They had also built in two holes where I could strap on the gloves to my hands in­stead of us­ing ad­di­tion­al clips.”

CRP USA and Tatyana con­tin­ue to col­lab­or­ate to en­hance the 3D prin­ted wheel­chair ra­cing gloves, fo­cus­ing on im­prov­ing grip and com­fort, es­pe­cially when com­pet­ing in the rain. This on­go­ing part­ner­ship en­sures that Tatyana al­ways has ac­cess to the latest ad­vance­ments in ad­dit­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing tech­no­logy, al­low­ing her to main­tain her com­pet­it­ive edge. As Tatyana em­phas­izes, “CRP USA team keeps find­ing ways to make the gloves even bet­ter. To­geth­er, we con­tinu­ously strive to im­prove my per­form­ance.”

About Tatyana Mc­Fad­den:
Tatyana Mc­Fad­den is a Para­lympic cham­pi­on with 20 medals, in­clud­ing eight golds, and 24 World Ma­jor Mara­thon wins. She is known for her re­lent­less pur­suit of ex­cel­lence and is cur­rently train­ing for the Par­is Para­lympics 2024. On June she is the new Amer­ic­an re­cord hold­er in the 400m
 

Strata­sys, a lead­er in poly­mer 3D print­ing solu­tions, an­nounced that it will provide 3D-prin­ted ma­ter­i­als for an up­com­ing lun­ar mis­sion to test their per­form­ance on the sur­face of the moon. The ex­per­i­ments are part of Ae­gis Aerospace, Inc.’s first Space Sci­ence & Tech­no­logy Eval­u­ation Fa­cil­ity mis­sion (SSTEF-1), planned for 2025. SSTEF is a com­mer­cial space test­ing ser­vice, de­veloped by Ae­gis Aerospace in Hou­s­ton, Texas un­der NASA’s Tip­ping Point pro­gram, to provide R&D ser­vices on the lun­ar sur­face. The SSTEF-1 project fo­cuses on tech­no­logy de­vel­op­ment for space in­fra­struc­ture and cap­ab­il­it­ies for the moon and near-earth space. The Strata­sys ex­per­i­ments are sponsored by Northrop Grum­man Cor­por­a­tion.

Un­manned lander mis­sion

In this moon mis­sion, Strata­sys will provide 3D-prin­ted samples that will be brought to the lun­ar sur­face by an un­manned lander in a car­ri­er struc­ture 3D-prin­ted by Strata­sys. Three ma­ter­i­als will be the fo­cus of two dif­fer­ent ex­per­i­ments led by Northrop Grum­man.
The first ex­per­i­ment as­sesses the per­form­ance of a sample coupon part made with Strata­sys’ Antero® 800NA FDM® fil­a­ment filled with tung­sten. Antero 800NA is a high-per­form­ance PEKK-based ther­mo­plastic with ex­cel­lent mech­an­ic­al prop­er­ties, chem­ic­al res­ist­ance, and low out­gass­ing char­ac­ter­ist­ics. Adding tung­sten is in­ten­ded to provide shield­ing against harm­ful ra­di­ation such as gamma rays or x-rays.

Ex­pos­ure to harsh en­vir­on­ments

The second pass­ive ex­per­i­ment is de­signed to see how 3D-prin­ted ma­ter­i­als per­form in space. It will in­clude Antero 840CN03 FDM fil­a­ment, which fea­tures ESD prop­er­ties for use with elec­tron­ics and was used on the Or­i­on space­craft. The ex­per­i­ment will also in­clude a new ESD pho­to­poly­mer man­u­fac­tured by Strata­sys part­ner Hen­kel for use with Strata­sys’ Ori­gin® One 3D print­ers and de­signed for high-heat en­vir­on­ments. This ex­per­i­ment will sub­ject coupon samples of the 3D-prin­ted ma­ter­i­als to moon dust, low pres­sure that can lead to out­gass­ing, and the rap­id tem­per­at­ure swings that res­ult from vir­tu­ally no at­mo­sphere on the moon.

“Ad­dit­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing is an im­port­ant tech­no­logy for space mis­sions where every ounce of weight mat­ters and high per­form­ance is es­sen­tial,” said Chief In­dus­tri­al Busi­ness Of­ficer Rich Gar­rity. “This set of ex­per­i­ments will help us un­der­stand how to fully lever­age 3D print­ing to keep people and equip­ment safe as we travel to the moon and bey­ond.”

Parts will be brought to the lun­ar sur­face by an un­manned lander in a Strata­sys 3D prin­ted car­ri­er struc­ture made from UL­TEM™ 9085 ther­mo­plastic, which is a ma­ter­i­al also com­monly used in com­mer­cial air­craft in­teri­ors.

Pic 2 and Pic 3:

The Strata­sys FDM® Antero 840CN03 ra­di­ation ex­per­i­ment hous­ing con­tain­ing ra­di­ation shield­ing test samples – in­clud­ing Strata­sys FDM Antero 800NA tung­sten filled ma­ter­i­al (dark gray) and SL Somos Per­FORM ma­ter­i­al (white). The ma­ter­i­als are part of an ex­per­i­ment between Strata­sys and Northrup Grum­man to test how cer­tain 3D prin­ted ma­ter­i­als hold up un­der lun­ar con­di­tions. (c) Strata­sys

In Wire Arc Ad­dit­ive Man­u­fac­tur­ing (WAAM), the ma­ter­i­al is ap­plied to a base plate as a wire us­ing arc weld­ing, weld bead by weld bead. This has sev­er­al ad­vant­ages com­pared to powder-based pro­cesses: wire is sig­ni­fic­antly cheap­er as a start­ing ma­ter­i­al and most ma­ter­i­als are avail­able in wire form. In ad­di­tion, both the com­plex powder hand­ling and the va­cu­um tech­no­logy can be dis­pensed with. However, the biggest ad­vant­age is the very high build-up rate that can be achieved us­ing WAAM. De­pend­ing on the ma­ter­i­al used, this can be up to 650 cm³ pro per hour.

WAAM ma­chines with large in­stall­a­tion space

The Ber­lin-based com­pany GE­FER­TEC de­vel­ops and builds ma­chines that use the WAAM pro­cess for the 3D print­ing of metals. The arc ma­chines, which are avail­able as 3-ax­is and 5-ax­is ver­sions in dif­fer­ent sizes, in­teg­rate soph­ist­ic­ated arc weld­ing tech­no­logy, user-friendly CAM soft­ware and a ma­chine tool to cre­ate a ready-to-use ad­dit­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing solu­tion. In the cur­rently largest ex­pan­sion stage with an in­stall­a­tion space of 8 m³, com­pon­ents weigh­ing up to 8000 kg can be man­u­fac­tured. Spe­cially de­veloped CAM soft­ware uses the CAD data of the work­piece to gen­er­ate the data that the CNC con­trol uses to pre­cisely po­s­i­tion the weld­ing head.

The ma­chine then pro­duces the near-net-shape work­piece fully auto­mat­ic­ally. After the 3D print­ing pro­cess, the sur­face of the com­pon­ent is com­pletely or par­tially ma­chined, de­pend­ing on the re­quire­ments of the ap­plic­a­tion. 

Con­trol tem­per­at­ure in the pro­cess 

Tem­per­at­ures play an im­port­ant role in the WAAM pro­cess. This is be­cause the tem­per­at­ure dis­tri­bu­tion in the work­piece and the cool­ing be­ha­vi­or are es­sen­tial to en­sure the qual­ity of the fin­ished com­pon­ent. "Dur­ing ma­chine op­er­a­tion, weld­ing is only star­ted when the un­der­ly­ing lay­er has cooled down to a cer­tain tem­per­at­ure," ex­plains Mar­tin Lange, product de­vel­op­ment em­ploy­ee at GE­FER­TEC. If the in­ter­me­di­ate lay­er is still too warm, this leads to un­even build-up be­ha­vi­or - the lay­er thick­ness would vary too much and the geo­metry of the com­pon­ent would not be main­tained. The cor­res­pond­ing tem­per­at­ure meas­ure­ment tech­no­logy is solved in the ma­chine with a pyro­met­er. After com­plet­ing a lay­er, the weld­ing head moves to the start­ing point of the next lay­er, where the pyro­met­er meas­ures the tem­per­at­ure of the com­pon­ent. And only when this has dropped to the pre­set value does the ma­chine con­tin­ue work­ing. "In most ap­plic­a­tions, we set a value of 150 °C to 200 °C for the in­ter­me­di­ate lay­er tem­per­at­ure," says the de­vel­op­ment en­gin­eer: "This is ideal for the re­pro­du­cib­il­ity of the weld seam height." Pyro­met­ers from the CT series from Optris are to be used in the arc ma­chines that GE­FER­TEC will sup­ply in fu­ture. These have a com­pact meas­ur­ing head that can be eas­ily in­teg­rated in­to the ma­chine. The sep­ar­ate elec­tron­ics box, which is loc­ated in the con­trol cab­in­et, has vari­ous out­puts through which the value is trans­ferred to the ma­chine's con­trol sys­tem. In this way, the in­ter­lay­er tem­per­at­ure is set per­fectly to the right value dur­ing op­er­a­tion. 

In or­der to de­term­ine the tem­per­at­ure ac­cur­ately with a pyro­met­er, the emissiv­ity must be known ex­actly. A falsi­fic­a­tion of the meas­ure­ment can also oc­cur if the view of the meas­ur­ing sur­face is not un­ob­struc­ted. "With our arc ma­chines, we can also print com­pon­ents made of ti­tani­um, al­though the de­vel­op­ment of a lot of smoke can­not be avoided," says M. Lange, ex­plain­ing the prob­lem. In this case, the use of ra­tio pyro­met­ers, such as those from the CTra­tio series from Optris, is re­com­men­ded. As the ra­tio of the in­tens­it­ies at two wavelengths is formed here, the meas­ure­ment can be car­ried out re­li­ably des­pite dis­turbed vis­ion. "This is why we will prob­ably use the CTra­tio series pyro­met­ers in ma­chines in the fu­ture if the user wants to use them to print ti­tani­um com­pon­ents," says M. Lange.

In­frared cam­er­as in de­vel­op­ment 

In­frared cam­er­as are also used in the de­vel­op­ment of the arc ma­chines and es­pe­cially in the qual­i­fic­a­tion of the pro­cesses. "In the con­text of our in­vest­ig­a­tions, it is ad­vant­age­ous to be able to re­cord an over­all im­age and thus ob­tain a spa­tial dis­tri­bu­tion of the tem­per­at­ures," ex­plains Mar­tin Wolter, who works as a weld­ing en­gin­eer in pro­cess de­vel­op­ment at GE­FER­TEC. This makes it pos­sible to ex­am­ine tem­per­at­ure dis­tri­bu­tions and cool­ing pro­cesses, which are re­quired for the qual­i­fic­a­tion of the pro­cesses. The use of a Spot­find­er in­frared cam­era such as the Xi 400 from Optris is par­tic­u­larly help­ful here. This has an op­tic­al res­ol­u­tion of 382 x 288 pixels. 

"As the spec­tral range used in the cur­rent in­frared cam­era is not op­tim­al for use on met­al sur­faces, we only get a qual­it­at­ive state­ment and no real tem­per­at­ures," M. Wolter em­phas­izes a small dis­ad­vant­age of the cur­rent in­frared cam­era. In or­der to de­term­ine the ac­tu­al tem­per­at­ures in the melt pool and its sur­round­ings, a new in­frared cam­era from Optris, the PI 1ML, which is spe­cially de­signed for ap­plic­a­tions with metals, may be used in fu­ture. It uses a meas­ur­ing wavelength in the range of 1 µm; in this spec­tral range, the emissiv­ity of metals is sig­ni­fic­antly high­er than in the usu­al spec­tral range between 8 µm and 14 µm. This en­ables more ac­cur­ate and bet­ter tem­per­at­ure meas­ure­ments in this ap­plic­a­tion.

Simple eval­u­ation of the ther­mo­graph­ic im­ages 

The in­frared cam­er­as from Optris can be con­nec­ted to a PC via a USB in­ter­face in or­der to trans­fer the re­cor­ded im­ages. With the PIX Con­nect ana­lys­is soft­ware, which Optris sup­plies to­geth­er with the in­frared cam­er­as, the ther­mo­graph­ic im­ages can be eval­u­ated in real time. The soft­ware also makes it easy to archive the im­ages.
 

An ex­ample can be found in the of­fer­ings of Mi­croStep, a glob­al man­u­fac­turer and sup­pli­er of CNC cut­ting ma­chines, us­ing cut­ting tech­no­lo­gies such as plasma and oxy­fuel, laser, and wa­ter­jet.

For more than 10 years, Mi­croStep has been re­ly­ing on servo mo­tors and drivers of the MI­NAS series from Panason­ic In­dustry and wit­nessed the con­stant tech­nic­al up­grad­ing of the drives. These con­stant im­prove­ments helped Mi­croStep with their reg­u­lar tech­no­logy mi­gra­tion to main­tain the qual­ity of their sys­tems. After the MI­NAS A5, the com­pany in­teg­rated Panason­ic’s MI­NAS A6 servo drives in­to their ma­chines. They are part of a highly dy­nam­ic servo driver fam­ily with a wide power range from 50W to 15kW and are suit­able for many dif­fer­ent areas of ap­plic­a­tions bey­ond CNC ma­chines. Char­ac­ter­ized by a com­pact but also ro­bust design, the servo drivers and mo­tors of the MI­NAS A6 series have been equipped with es­sen­tial func­tions for damp­ing res­on­ance fre­quen­cies while elim­in­at­ing vi­bra­tion tend­en­cies. 

“We chose Panason­ic In­dustry’s MI­NAS servo mo­tor and drive solu­tions due to their proven re­li­ab­il­ity and high qual­ity. The zero vi­bra­tion of the servo mo­tor series was a key factor for choos­ing them, as any spuri­ous mo­tion can im­pact the ma­chin­ing pro­cess,” com­ments Pa­vol Varga, Tech­nic­al Dir­ect­or from Mi­croStep. In ad­di­tion to the servo mo­tors and drives be­ing ex­tremely pre­cise and fast, Panason­ic is a glob­ally op­er­at­ing com­pany with a long her­it­age in man­u­fac­tur­ing and can guar­an­tee the qual­ity of its products and also the on-time de­liv­ery. “Work­ing with a vendor of that caliber en­ables us to ful­fill cus­tom­er ex­pect­a­tions, aided by a re­li­able sup­port team with a high level of tech­nic­al ex­pert­ise,” adds Varga.

An­oth­er im­port­ant as­pect of in­teg­rat­ing the MI­NAS servo mo­tor and drive solu­tions in­to their CNC ma­chines was the avail­ab­il­ity of high­er-out­put mo­tors that en­abled Mi­croStep to ex­tend their product port­fo­lio up­wards to more power­ful sys­tems and solu­tions. 

Heat-res­ist­ant seal

Since these sys­tems are de­ployed in an in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ment, it is also crit­ic­al to en­sure that the mo­tors in­volved re­quire little main­ten­ance work and do not cause op­er­a­tion­al troubles. “Our servo mo­tors of the MI­NAS fam­ily are pro­tec­ted by a dust-proof and heat-res­ist­ant oil seal made of a ma­ter­i­al with a high tem­per­at­ure res­ist­ance. Fur­ther­more, the mo­tors can be se­lec­ted by type ac­cord­ing to the op­er­a­tion en­vir­on­ment. These fea­tures render our products ideal for pro­duc­tion en­vir­on­ments that are ex­posed to dust, heat and oil mist. Dir­ect-mount con­nect­ors are used for the mo­tor power sup­ply and en­coder in­put and out­put to im­prove the seal­ing per­form­ance so that the mo­tor achieves an IP67 de­gree of pro­tec­tion”, re­marks Stan­islav Za­ujec, Seni­or Sales En­gin­eer from Panason­ic In­dustry.

A con­stant pro­cess and a con­tin­ued part­ner­ship 

As Mi­croStep grew stead­ily and star­ted de­liv­er­ing CNC cut­ting ma­chines to cus­tom­ers all around the world, a re­li­able part­ner for mo­tion solu­tions was needed. In 2013, Panason­ic In­dustry star­ted to provide MI­NAS A5 servo drives, which en­abled Mi­croStep to meet their cus­tom­ers’ pro­duc­tion de­mands.  The high qual­ity and es­pe­cially zero-vi­bra­tion of the servo drives con­vinced Mi­croStep to im­ple­ment the Ja­pan­ese tech­no­logy in­to the CNC lineup. But not only the fea­tures and qual­ity of the products con­vinced Mi­croStep to rely on Panason­ic In­dustry. Thanks to a close con­tact with the loc­al team, Mi­croStep also gets sup­port with the design-in and im­ple­ment­a­tion pro­cesses. Ex­ist­ing ma­chines get reg­u­lar up­dates, and the de­vel­op­ment of new solu­tions can be handled very ef­fect­ively and quickly. 

“We are very con­tent with the per­son­al sup­port we have ex­per­i­enced over one dec­ade with Panason­ic In­dustry and we are look­ing for­ward for an even longer part­ner­ship with them”, Alexej Mak­uch, Mi­croStep’s Man­aging Dir­ect­or sums up. 

Look­ing for­ward

In­teg­rat­ing ad­vanced servo mo­tor and driver solu­tions like the MI­NAS series from Panason­ic In­dustry can help en­sure that pre­ci­sion ap­plic­a­tions like CNC ma­chines and oth­er ad­vanced in­dus­tri­al solu­tions ful­fill all of the de­mands for qual­ity, per­form­ance, and re­li­ab­il­ity. Paired with a de­pend­able pre- and af­ter­sales ser­vice that sup­ports with design-in, im­ple­ment­a­tion, up­dates and train­ings, Mi­croStep and Panason­ic In­dustry are look­ing for­ward to work­ing on new de­vel­op­ments and projects to­geth­er.
 

Nabtesco, manufacturer of precision cycloidal gears, offers a comprehensive range of automation solutions for the production, handling and packaging of food products. Whether high speed handling, robotic assisted positioning or dynamic pick and place applications are required, Nabtesco has the right gear solution for any food industry application. The special design of these innovative gearheads makes them extremely precise (max. hysteresis loss of 1 arc.min), robust (shock resistance up to 500% of rated torque) and compact (about 50% shorter than multi-stage planetary gearheads). They allow high speeds and accelerations with absolute reliability, excellent repeatability and path accuracy. Even in applications with very fast and sudden movements, they ensure fast and precise gripping and placement.

Hygienic gears 

The Neco® and RD-C series gears have a special hygienic design with smooth surfaces and optimised seals. This makes them easy to clean. On request, Nabtesco can supply the precision gears with special coatings or filled with H1 food-grade lubricants. The hygienic design of the Neco and RD-C gears makes them ideal for use in packaging machines and filling systems, as well as handling and positioning systems such as Scara or pallet loading robots.

High precision and rigidity 

The Neco range of fully enclosed gearheads meets the most demanding requirements for performance and ease of use. They achieve high precision with a maximum hysteresis loss of 0.5 arcmin and are fully corrosion protected. They are ideal for all hygiene-critical handling and positioning applications where a combination of good cleanability, excellent performance and high efficiency is required, thanks to their easy-to-clean design, high precision and rigidity, and excellent efficiency. Another advantage: The extra cost of oversized systems is eliminated thanks to the modularity and flexibility of the range. Instead of using a separate interface to connect each type of motor, a flexible system of modular bushings and flanges ensures easy adaptation to all standard servo motors. 

Versatile hollow shaft gearboxes

The RD-C range of compact gearboxes is the choice when the application requires a hollow shaft. The large hollow shaft provides ample space for data and power cables, as well as drive shafts, to pass through the centre of the gearbox. Another advantage is that the hollow shaft does not remain rigid. It is designed to rotate at the output speed. This makes it possible to position the drive shaft directly using a sensor mounted on the hollow shaft. The RD-C series is available in three versions, making it extremely versatile for use in a wide range of applications. The RDR-C series is designed for angular mounting. The RDS-C series is for direct mounting and the RDP-C is a belt-driven version.
 

Lika Electronic's RD7 rotary actuator combines the benefits of automatic changeovers and adjustments with the advantages of wireless technology. It makes production processes more flexible and efficient, shortens changeover times, cuts costs, reduces downtime and minimises the risk of errors and material waste. It easily replaces manual handwheels and position indicators, for example when modernising existing equipment. It also reduces installation problems by eliminating signal wiring and makes it easier to programme and control the actuator network remotely. An alternative RS-485 wired communication (Modbus RTU compliant, wired and plugged output options) is available on request. 

The RD7 rotary actuator integrates the motor, encoder, controller and antenna in a single package that is very compact and takes up less space than conventional manual handwheels and position indicators. The robust housing is dustproof and waterproof to IP65. The through hollow shaft has a diameter of up to 20 mm (0.787 inch). Adapter flanges, reduction sleeves and high torque adapters can be supplied to meet individual installation requirements. The RD7 is also equipped with a diagnostic LED and some buttons for setup and jog functions, and can also be supplied with a 7-segment display. 

Wireless connection benefits 

The drive eliminates the need for communication cables, reducing installation costs. Using a single 2.4 GHz wireless transceiver with DIN rail mounting compatibility, up to 32 units can be controlled simultaneously and remotely on the same network. Production data and diagnostic information can also be collected. The transceiver is PLC compatible and also CC-Link and EtherNet/IP compliant. A software tool is supplied free of charge. It has been designed to configure all units connected to the network via wireless communication and store their operating parameters in up to 100 setup recipes. As there is no need for communication cables, the units have a small footprint and can be easily installed in places that are difficult or dangerous to access, such as high places or where it is difficult to run cables. A range of transceivers, repeater hubs and cables are available to simplify connection and reduce electrical work. Typical applications for the RD7 Positioner include changeovers on packaging and bottling lines, filling machines, pharmaceutical equipment and food processing machinery. As mentioned above, it is also ideal for replacing handwheels and position indicators when retrofitting outdated equipment.
 

In most cases, temperature measurement in industrial production environments is based on two physical effects: the temperature dependence of a resistor or the thermoelectric effect (Seebeck effect). ifm now offers new IO-Link temperature measurement modules for such resistance thermometers (Pt100 and Pt1000) and thermocouples (type J and type K). The measured temperature values are then made available digitally via IO-Link to higher-level controllers.

Configuration via IO-Link

The resistance thermometers and thermocouples are connected via four M12 connectors on the module. The resistance thermometers can be connected using 2-wire, 3-wire or 4-wire technology. The individual connections can be configured conveniently via IO-Link. The type of measuring element – Pt100, Pt100, thermocouple type J or type K – can be specified there. Depending on the measuring line, the parameters ‘cold junction offset’ and ‘zero-point calibration’ can also be set for the thermocouples. The resolution of the temperature measurement with the new module is 0.01 °C, and the accuracy over the entire measuring range is ±0.3 %. With a protection rating of IP67 or IP69K, the modules can also be used in harsh industrial environments.

The new IO-Link temperature measurement modules are suitable for all applications in which several temperatures need to be detected and in which measuring resistors or thermocouples are used. A typical example is thermoforming of components for vehicle interiors where precise temperature control over the entire component is important. The new modules can also be used in machine tools, packaging machines and ore processing in mining. 
 

FLIR un­veiled ADGiLE, a fixed-moun­ted meth­ane mon­it­or­ing solu­tion. Fea­tur­ing op­tic­al gas ima­ging (OGI) with com­pre­hens­ive edge de­tec­tion ana­lyt­ics, ADGiLE is the oil and gas in­dustry’s solu­tion to meet­ing en­vir­on­ment­al stew­ard­ship and ef­fi­ciency goals. The sys­tem, fea­tur­ing a pan-tilt gas ima­ging cam­era, edge com­put­ing device, con­nectiv­ity, and FLIR United VMS soft­ware with­in a rug­ged­ized pack­age, can help com­pan­ies ad­dress the ever-evolving re­quire­ments for re­du­cing meth­ane gas leaks with­in oil and gas pro­duc­tion, trans­mis­sion, and stor­age in­fra­struc­ture.

De­signed for wide-scale site video mon­it­or­ing and con­tinu­ous leak de­tec­tion ap­plied to stor­age tanks, com­pressors, sep­ar­at­ors and many oth­er equip­ment in the oil and gas in­dustry, ADGiLE of­fers an in­dustry-first, end-to-end fixed meth­ane de­tec­tion solu­tion that lever­ages FLIR’s un­cooled GF77a OGI tech­no­logy, and is con­sequen­tial to in­dustry de­mands con­cern­ing meth­ane mit­ig­a­tion.

Ana­lyt­ics at the edge

FLIR ADGiLE pairs the GF77a with plat­form ana­lyt­ics pro­cessed at the edge to de­tect emis­sions through auto­mat­ic early de­tec­tion, quickly pin­point­ing the leak source. It provides the crit­ic­al situ­ation­al aware­ness on the emis­sion event that isn’t pos­sible with oth­er meth­ane de­tec­tion tech­no­lo­gies, such as satel­lite and aer­i­al based de­tec­tion meth­ods. Data is dis­played via the FLIR United VMS soft­ware back at the con­trol room, which can be con­figured with cus­tom alerts, areas of in­terest, and pre-set ima­ging path­ways for a truly auto­mated ex­per­i­ence.
The solu­tion primar­ily fo­cuses on mid­stream and high-con­cen­tra­tion meth­ane up­stream ap­plic­a­tions. It works to de­tect and pre­vent high volume emis­sion events, com­pared to FLIR’s ex­ist­ing cooled hand­held OGI tech­no­logy, lever­aging FLIR’s un­matched edge de­tec­tion ana­lyt­ics built upon dec­ades of de­tec­tion data and ex­per­i­ence to de­liv­er con­sist­ent, ac­cur­ate res­ults. The sys­tem in­creases both site ef­fi­ciency and safety, as it op­er­ates equally well dur­ing the day and in total dark­ness at safe dis­tances, pending at­mo­spher­ic and site con­di­tions.

Re­li­able in­ter­mit­tent leak de­tec­tion

FLIR ADGiLE uniquely meets the most ser­i­ous meth­ane leak de­tec­tion chal­lenges while provid­ing op­er­a­tion­al in­sight to un­der­stand emis­sions that are a part of routine in­dustry pro­cesses versus fu­git­ive emis­sion events. The sys­tem can also help pre­vent false read­ings, sav­ing time and re­sources by avoid­ing the need to manu­ally in­vest­ig­ate and con­firm spe­cif­ic leaks. At the same time, it can still de­tect in­ter­mit­tent leaks that hap­pen and are too of­ten missed by de­ployed aer­i­al de­tec­tion tech­no­lo­gies us­ing a wider tem­por­al fre­quency. It can gen­er­ate situ­ation­al aware­ness that ad­dresses the full range of chal­lenges stem­ming from vari­ous meth­ane emis­sion scen­ari­os.
 

Pro­cess Sens­ing Tech­no­lo­gies (PST) has re­cently launched a range of in­trins­ic­ally safe op­tic­al li­quid level switches. 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, heavy-duty auto­mot­ive, leak de­tec­tion, hy­draul­ic reser­voirs, tank/con­tain­er level­con­trol, 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.

For op­er­at­ing tem­per­at­ures up to 80°C

These li­quid level switches are highly ro­bust and res­ist­ant to chem­ic­al at­tack, with an op­er­at­ing tem­per­at­ure range between -30 and +80°C (-22…+176°F). 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. ATEX, UKCA, and IECEx cer­ti­fied, these switches of­fer met­ric and im­per­i­al pro­cess con­nec­tion op­tions with NAMUR out­put. The PST range of in­trins­ic­ally safe op­tic­al li­quid level switches of­fer ex­cep­tion­al re­li­ab­il­ity and ac­cur­acy for use in chal­len­ging en­vir­on­ments and are de­signed and cer­ti­fied to meet the highest in­dustry stand­ards.
 

Build­ing on the suc­cess of the ac­claimed FLEXI-FLOW Com­pact series, Bronk­horst presents a com­pre­hens­ive line ex­ten­sion of­fer­ing un­par­alleled ver­sat­il­ity and pre­ci­sion in gas flow meas­ure­ment and con­trol. FLEXI-FLOW Com­pact sets a new stand­ard in com­pact­ness, func­tion­al­ity and ad­apt­ab­il­ity, serving a wide range of ap­plic­a­tions with pre­ci­sion and ef­fi­ciency.

In­teg­rated Eth­er­Net com­mu­nic­a­tion 

The latest it­er­a­tion of the FLEXI-FLOW Com­pact range in­tro­duces a num­ber of in­nov­at­ive mod­els and fea­tures, in­clud­ing in­stru­ments tailored for lower flow ranges from 0-5 mln/min. In ad­di­tion, the range now in­cludes down­por­ted in­stru­ments for ap­plic­a­tions where top-mount­ing is re­quired, and flow con­trol­lers with in­teg­ral shut-off valves to provide a high­er de­gree of leak tight­ness or emer­gency shut off. One of the key en­hance­ments to the FLEXI-FLOW Com­pact Series is the in­clu­sion of Eth­er­Net com­mu­nic­a­tion, provid­ing seam­less con­nectiv­ity and in­teg­ra­tion cap­ab­il­it­ies for mod­ern in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ments.

The new mod­els, like the ori­gin­al FLEXI-FLOW Com­pact in­stru­ments, util­ise a unique through-chip sensor com­bined with proven by­pass tech­no­logy. These thermal mass flow meters and con­trol­lers of­fer ex­cep­tion­al per­form­ance and are 35% smal­ler than tra­di­tion­al in­stru­ments, mak­ing them the smal­lest on the mar­ket for flow ranges up to 20 ln/min.

Fast re­sponse for pre­cise con­trol

Ad­vanced sensor tech­no­logy en­sures not only stable flow con­trol, but also fast re­sponse times, with set­tling times of less than 150 ms, en­abling pre­cise con­trol even un­der dy­nam­ic pro­cess con­di­tions. In­teg­rated tem­per­at­ure and pres­sure sensors and an on-board gas data­base en­sure un­par­alleled ac­cur­acy over vary­ing pro­cess para­met­ers, mak­ing the in­stru­ments ad­apt­able to a wide range of ap­plic­a­tions. They also of­fer com­pre­hens­ive mon­it­or­ing and con­trol fea­tures, in­clud­ing in­teg­rated tem­per­at­ure and pres­sure sensors, a USB-C port for easy setup, op­tion­al Bluetooth com­mu­nic­a­tion for im­proved ac­cess­ib­il­ity, and NAMUR status in­dic­a­tion via col­oured LEDs and di­git­al out­put para­met­ers.

Wheth­er as pre-con­figured mod­els, built-to-or­der solu­tions or cus­tom­ised multi-chan­nel sys­tems, the FLEXI­FLOW Com­pact range of­fers un­ri­valled flex­ib­il­ity to meet spe­cif­ic ap­plic­a­tion re­quire­ments. With free and in­tu­it­ive soft­ware tools for con­fig­ur­a­tion, dia­gnostics and pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance, Bronk­horst en­sures seam­less in­teg­ra­tion and op­tim­al per­form­ance in vari­ous in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ments.

PULS an­nounced the launch of its new series of PISA-M 4-chan­nel elec­tron­ic cir­cuit break­ers (ECBs). These devices are the per­fect safety and power dis­tri­bu­tion tool for ap­plic­a­tions with power re­quire­ments ran­ging from 90 W to 480 W. The elec­tron­ic cir­cuit break­ers man­age the cur­rent dis­tri­bu­tion on the sec­ond­ary (load) side of a con­trol sys­tem sep­ar­at­ing it in­to smal­ler “power is­lands” which are easi­er to main­tain and re­duce the risk of costly total power out­ages.

The PISA-M ECBs provide com­pre­hens­ive safety solu­tions for power sys­tems. They pro­tect sys­tem com­pon­ents from over-cur­rent and short-cir­cuits as well as wir­ing from over­heat­ing. In ad­di­tion it also pro­tects the sys­tem power sup­ply from over­load. The on-board pro­tec­tion fea­tures com­bine to en­sure a high sys­tem ro­bust­ness and re­li­ab­il­ity. This be­ne­fits users with less time spent on main­ten­ance, lower re­place­ment costs and more fo­cus on op­er­a­tions. One fea­ture is a di­git­al coded in­ter­face provid­ing an easy way for main­ten­ance staff to re­motely con­trol the devices and to mon­it­or the op­er­a­tion­al sys­tem status. This means power dis­tri­bu­tion can be man­aged eas­ily via a PLC and a cent­ral user in­ter­face.

Com­pact design

With a width of only 22.5 mm, PISA-M is one of the smal­lest 4-chan­nel elec­tron­ic cir­cuit break­er in the mar­ket. This com­pact design means it can fit in­to any sys­tem, free­ing up valu­able space in con­trol cab­in­ets. Push-in con­nect­ors on the front of the PISA-M al­low for a quick and tool-less in­stall­a­tion, sav­ing time and ef­fort. In ad­di­tion, two-col­our LEDs that show the status of each out­put chan­nel in real-time, and a but­ton is provided on each chan­nel for easy on/off switch­ing and re­set­ting, op­er­at­ing the PISA-M is straight­for­ward and ef­fort­less.

PULS provides a num­ber of ver­sions of PISA-M ECB. The 4ADJ mod­ules are ad­justable, al­low­ing each out­put chan­nel to be set to the re­quired cur­rent value from 1 to 8 A. If a plug-and-play device with fixed cur­rents is needed, PULS of­fers PISA-M ver­sions with fixed out­put cur­rent set­tings (e.g. 2 A, 4 A, 6 A, 8 A). This flex­ib­il­ity al­lows cus­tom­ers to choose the ver­sion that best fits their spe­cif­ic needs, mak­ing the in­stall­a­tion pro­cess even faster, easi­er, and more se­cure.
 

CTX of­fers cool­ing solu­tions for power sup­ply units, trans­ducers, bat­tery char­gers, fre­quency con­vert­ers, elec­tric drives, and in­vert­ers. Which heat sink to use de­pends on the power dis­sip­a­tion and on the re­quire­ments of the par­tic­u­lar device. Ex­truded pro­file heat sinks, cold for­ging heat sinks, and PCB board or SMD heat sinks for nat­ur­al con­vec­tion are typ­ic­al op­tions for ro­bust and low-main­ten­ance devices.

Alu­min­um pro­file heat sinks – ef­fi­cient and ver­sat­ile 

Ef­fect­ive thermal dis­sip­a­tion through nat­ur­al con­vec­tion is achieved with alu­min­um pro­file heat sinks. This is made pos­sible by the rib-like con­struc­tion called fins, which res­ults in a large over­all heat sink sur­face area. Alu­min­um pro­file heat sinks are gen­er­ally man­u­fac­tured from an alu­min­um ex­truded al­loy with a thermal con­duct­iv­ity of 200-220 W/mK.

The CTX port­fo­lio com­prises both stand­ard and project- or ap­plic­a­tion-spe­cif­ic cool­ing solu­tions. The spec­trum of stand­ard ex­truded heat sinks in­cludes fin, comb and fin­ger heat sinks, as well as PCB-board heat sinks. Stand­ard pro­file heat sinks range from 12.4 mm to 750 mm in width, with a weight between 130 g/m and 75.1 kg/m and thermal res­ist­ance Rth between 81.6 °C/W and 0.04 °C/W.

Sur­face ad­apt­a­tions

On re­quest, CTX will also per­form post-CNC ma­chin­ing, based on cus­tom­er draw­ings. The cool­ing spe­cial­ist’s ser­vices like­wise in­clude pro­fes­sion­al sur­face treat­ment, like wet-paint­ing, chrome plat­ing, an­od­iz­ing, or powder coat­ing. CTX also of­fers its cus­tom­ers la­beling of their heat sinks by means of screen print­ing or laser en­grav­ing, as well as sur­face treat­ment by sand blast­ing or glass ball blast­ing.
 

Ya­mai­chi Elec­tron­ics' IEC 61076-2-012 com­pli­ant Y-Circ M sys­tem is IP65 / IP67 wa­ter­proof and dust­proof and uses in­de­pend­ent seal­ing con­cepts for screw and push-pull con­nect­ors, as both the sock­et and mat­ing con­nect­or are equipped with their own stand­ard O-rings to en­sure ef­fect­ive seal­ing. When the push-pull sock­et is mated with an M12 threaded con­nect­or, seal­ing is achieved by an O-ring at the bot­tom of the sock­et, which is ac­tiv­ated by a pre­cise torque. However, when the M12 push-pull is used as a cable con­nect­or, it has its own O-ring that seals the col­lar of the re­cept­acle, thus pre­vent­ing in­gress of me­dia at an early stage.

An­oth­er ad­vant­age is the use of stand­ard O-rings. Un­like form seal­ings, these are avail­able world­wide without tool­ing costs. The use of stand­ard O-rings also al­lows auto­mat­ic as­sembly when in­teg­rat­ing the in­su­lat­ors in­to cus­tom­er hous­ings.

Flex­ible switch between push-pull and screw lock­ing

An out­stand­ing fea­ture of the Y-Circ M is the abil­ity to switch flex­ibly between push-pull and screw lock­ing without com­prom­ising seal­ing. This is be­cause the seals are not worn by the oth­er sys­tem dur­ing mixed mat­ing cycles, but re­tain their full seal­ing ef­fect.

This al­lows flex­ible switch­ing between lock­ing types for up to 100 spe­cified mat­ing cycles, guar­an­teed by the man­u­fac­turer, while main­tain­ing full seal­ing per­form­ance. This flex­ib­il­ity is par­tic­u­larly be­ne­fi­cial in ap­plic­a­tions where dif­fer­ent lock­ing sys­tems are used without com­prom­ising the re­li­ab­il­ity of the con­nec­tion.

This for­ward-think­ing design also al­lows the man­u­fac­turer to make their device "push-pull ready" and still use the clas­sic screw lock­ing sys­tem if re­quired.
 

TDK Lambda in­tro­duces the 400 to 750W rated RGB series of rug­gedised non-isol­ated DC-DC con­vert­ers.  Op­er­at­ing from in­put voltages of 9 to 18V, 18 to 32V or 18 to 60V, these buck step-down con­vert­ers can de­liv­er out­put voltages ad­justable from 0.8 to 8V or 3.3 to 24V with out­put cur­rents of up to 60A (de­pend­ing on the power level). The series is de­signed to be used in harsh en­vir­on­ment ap­plic­a­tions in­clud­ing med­ic­al, auto­mated guided vehicles (AGV), in­dus­tri­al mo­bile ro­bots (IMR), in­dus­tri­al, test, meas­ure­ment, and bat­tery-powered equip­ment.

Fan­less op­er­a­tion

Ef­fi­cien­cies of up to 98.5% al­low the product to de­liv­er high us­able power in de­mand­ing thermal en­vir­on­ments with case tem­per­at­ures of -40°C to +115°C, while provid­ing a longer bat­tery life. With a 1/16th brick pin­out and meas­ur­ing 38.1 x 49.5 x 13.0mm (WxLxH), the con­vert­ers are en­cap­su­lated to provide shock and vi­bra­tion per­form­ance to MIL-STD-810G. The five-sided alu­mini­um case re­duces ra­di­ated EMI and en­ables con­duc­tion cool­ing to a cold-plate for fan­less  op­er­a­tion.

The ba­sic fea­ture mod­els in­clude an out­put voltage ad­just­ment pin, neg­at­ive lo­gic re­mote on-off, re­mote sense, in­put un­der-voltage, over-cur­rent and thermal pro­tec­tion. An op­tion­al ad­justable cur­rent lim­it is also avail­able to re­duce stress on the in­put source, con­vert­er, and load in the event of an over­load. All mod­els carry the CE and UKCA marks for the Low Voltage and RoHS Dir­ect­ives and are de­signed to the IEC/UL/CSA/EN 62368-1 safety stand­ards. Eval­u­ation boards are avail­able for quick and easy test­ing.