Man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pan­ies are fa­cing ma­jor chal­lenges, ran­ging from ef­fi­ciency, cost-ef­fect­ive­ness and re­source con­ser­va­tion to deal­ing with the short­age of skilled la­bour. At Motek/Bon­d­expo's proven in­dustry plat­form in Stut­tgart from 8 to 11 Oc­to­ber, sup­pli­ers and users will ex­change ideas on how to fur­ther im­prove pro­duc­tion pro­cesses in the usu­al them­at­ic­ally fo­cused and prac­tic­al work­ing at­mo­sphere. The tra­di­tion­al au­tumn event will present the in­dustry with new, in­ter­est­ing and sus­tain­able ap­proaches.

Feed Tech­no­logy: Di­git­al­ised and Net­worked

Pre­par­a­tions for the show are in full swing. Top­ics in­clude net­worked, in­tel­li­gent pro­duc­tion com­pon­ents and sys­tems, as­sembly sup­port sys­tems and work­sta­tion sys­tems, solu­tions for easy im­ple­ment­a­tion and com­mis­sion­ing, as well as ob­ject re­cog­ni­tion and im­age pro­cessing for in­line part de­tec­tion. Tra­di­tion­ally, feed­ing tech­no­logy also plays an im­port­ant role. A wide range of com­pon­ents, parts, as­sem­blies and end products need to be fed and dis­charged in spe­cif­ic con­fig­ur­a­tions for pro­duc­tion pro­cesses. This is a key step in man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tions. 

Sup­ple­ment­ary Pro­gramme as Ideal Ad­di­tion to a Trade Fair Vis­it

The ex­hib­i­tion concept tra­di­tion­ally also in­cludes a first-class sup­port­ing pro­gramme, which en­riches a vis­it to the ex­hib­i­tion with in-depth in­form­a­tion and provides ad­di­tion­al op­por­tun­it­ies for per­son­al ex­change of ex­pert­ise. The Safety + Se­cur­ity in Auto­ma­tion For­um, or­gan­ised by Pilz and held on the first day of the ex­hib­i­tion (8th Oc­to­ber), is already a tra­di­tion­al fea­ture of the pro­gramme. The spe­cial­ist for­um is a meet­ing place for ex­perts from as­so­ci­ations, sci­ence and in­dustry who want to find out more about cur­rent top­ics re­lat­ing to safe auto­ma­tion and ma­chine safety. The fo­cus will be on prac­tic­al present­a­tions on safety in ma­chine man­u­fac­tur­ing, safe pro­duc­tion, new ma­chine reg­u­la­tions and cor­por­ate sus­tain­ab­il­ity. All present­a­tions can be at­ten­ded in­di­vidu­ally and spon­tan­eously without pri­or re­gis­tra­tion.

“A highly in­ter­est­ing sup­ple­ment­ary pro­gramme is cur­rently shap­ing up for this year’s event,” says Rain­er Bach­ert, long­stand­ing Motek/Bon­d­expo project man­ager at trade fair pro­moters P. E. Schall. “Once again in 2024, ex­pert vis­it­ors will ex­per­i­ence a con­cise trade fair concept with a con­sist­ent them­at­ic struc­ture in or­der to make trade fair vis­its ef­fi­cient and prof­it­able for every­one in­volved. The chal­lenges faced by the man­u­fac­tur­ing in­dus­tries ne­ces­sit­ate a per­son­al and prac­tic­al ex­change of tech­nic­al ex­pert­ise and a broad range of in­form­a­tion. Sup­pli­ers and users alike are look­ing for­ward to tak­ing ad­vant­age of Motek/Bon­d­expo 2024 as a tra­di­tion­al com­mu­nic­a­tion and tech­no­logy plat­form for their pro­duc­tion auto­ma­tion op­er­a­tions.”
 

TE Con­nectiv­ity re­mains a key driver to the Single Pair Eth­er­net (SPE) tech­no­logy as part of the SPE In­dus­tri­al Part­ner Net­work. TE, a found­ing mem­ber of the net­work, has been re-elec­ted to its board of dir­ect­ors. TE’s rep­res­ent­at­ive Claus Kleedörfer, man­aging dir­ect­or in TE’s in­dus­tri­al busi­ness, was ap­poin­ted as its vice chair. To­geth­er with the oth­er net­work part­ners, TE aims to es­tab­lish a com­pre­hens­ive SPE eco­sys­tem and con­sist­ent stand­ards for com­mu­nic­a­tion pro­to­cols, cabling and device com­pon­ents driv­ing ad­vance­ment in the In­dus­tri­al In­ter­net of Things (II­oT).

The new board of dir­ect­ors was elec­ted dur­ing the SPE In­dus­tri­al Part­ner Net­work gen­er­al meet­ing in April 2024. Claus Kleedörfer is one of four board mem­bers rep­res­ent­ing the found­ing mem­bers of the SPE IPN. The oth­ers are Frank Welzel, HART­ING Elec­tron­ics as Chair­man of the Board, Wolfgang Schenk, Belden / Hirschmann Auto­ma­tion & Con­trol (Treas­urer), and Jochen Metz, Metz Con­nect (Sec­ret­ary of the Board).The net­work is an equal al­li­ance of com­pan­ies that jointly define the stra­tegic ap­proach to es­tab­lish SPE as the new Eth­er­net tech­no­logy in the mar­ket and cre­ate the basis for rap­id growth of II­oT. Since the SPE IPN was foun­ded in 2019, TE has been rep­res­en­ted on the board and is a lead­ing force be­hind stand­ard­iz­a­tion and latest product in­tro­duc­tions. TE played a key role in the roll-out of the IEC 63171-7 in­ter­na­tion­al elec­tro­tech­nic­al stand­ard that defines M12 hy­brid con­nect­ors, sup­port­ing a faster ac­cept­ance of SPE in­ter­con­nect tech­no­logy in the in­dustry.

“SPE means a tech­no­lo­gic­al leap for­ward for Eth­er­net-based single-cable con­nectiv­ity solu­tions in smart factor­ies,” Claus Kleedörfer said. “We be­lieve SPE will re­vo­lu­tion­ize in­dus­tri­al com­mu­nic­a­tion in fu­ture II­oT ap­plic­a­tion, that is why TE – through col­lab­or­a­tion with oth­er SPE IPN mem­bers – is ded­ic­ated to make SPE the stand­ard in in­dus­tri­al auto­ma­tion.”
 

In April 2024, the pro­cess of con­struct­ing the new ex­ten­sion build­ing at In­fraTec GmbH In­frarot­sen­sorik und Mess­tech­nik reached its com­ple­tion after less than two and a half years. The new space provides In­fraTec em­ploy­ees with not only gen­er­ously pro­por­tioned, air-con­di­tioned of­fices, spa­cious pro­duc­tion and de­vel­op­ment areas for ther­mo­graphy cam­er­as and in­frared de­tect­ors have been es­tab­lished over a total area of 2700 m².

Sig­ni­fic­antly more ca­pa­city has also been cre­ated for ra­diomet­ric cal­ib­ra­tion of in­frared cam­er­as – the most im­port­ant step in the pro­cess of re­fin­ing these devices so that they can be used for tem­per­at­ure meas­ure­ment. Fol­low­ing suc­cess­ful test­ing, the pro­duc­tion de­part­ment has ad­op­ted a newly de­veloped cal­ib­ra­tion ma­chine with soph­ist­ic­ated, fully auto­mated tech­no­logy. Its high­er through­put, im­proved ac­cur­acy and en­hanced tech­nic­al para­met­ers provide a sol­id basis for cal­ib­rat­ing cur­rent and fu­ture gen­er­a­tions of In­fraTec ther­mo­graphy cam­er­as in line with the needs of dis­cern­ing cus­tom­ers work­ing in re­search, de­vel­op­ment and qual­ity as­sur­ance.

En­ergy Ef­fi­ciency in fo­cus 

Right from the earli­est stages of plan­ning the new build­ing, the fo­cus was on cre­at­ing an en­ergy-ef­fi­cient struc­ture aligned with Ger­many’s KfW55 ef­fi­ciency stand­ard. With triple-glaz­ing, en­hanced heat in­su­la­tion on the roof and facade, plus a photo­vol­ta­ic sys­tem with an out­put of 100 kWp sup­ply­ing the clean­room with green elec­tri­city, the build­ing now demon­strates out­stand­ing en­ergy cre­den­tials.

A firm com­mit­ment to Dresden

Backed by in­vest­ment to the tune of 20 mil­lion euros, the com­pleted build­ing marks In­fraTec’s largest con­struc­tion project to date and clearly il­lus­trates the com­pany’s com­mit­ment to Dresden as the home of its headquar­ters and pro­duc­tion activ­it­ies. In­fraTec has been pro­du­cing and de­vel­op­ing its products at the Tech­no­lo­gieZen­trum­Dresden busi­ness park loc­a­tion in the south of the city for more than 30 years. Back in 2018, the com­pany pur­chased prop­erty at the loc­a­tion and then sig­ni­fic­antly ex­ten­ded it to in­clude a new clean­room and of­fice wing for the sensor tech­no­logy di­vi­sion over the peri­od lead­ing up to the end of 2020. 

The ex­ten­sion work com­pleted dur­ing that year marked an­oth­er mile­stone in op­tim­ising In­fraTec’s man­u­fac­tur­ing struc­ture and cre­at­ing more pro­duc­tion ca­pa­city. In the fu­ture, In­fraTec will be well placed to re­spond to the rising de­mand for in­frared cam­er­as and de­tect­ors, al­most 70% of which it ex­ports world­wide.
 

Wibu-Sys­tems is proud to an­nounce the open­ing of its new of­fice in South Korea. This new sub­si­di­ary rep­res­ents a stra­tegic step in the com­pany’s growth jour­ney, al­low­ing the glob­al lead­er in soft­ware pro­tec­tion, li­cens­ing, and se­cur­ity to bet­ter serve its South Korean cus­tom­ers with tailored solu­tions and ded­ic­ated sup­port.

Why South Korea? 

South Korea stands out as one of the fast­est-grow­ing eco­nom­ies glob­ally, renowned for its dy­nam­ic busi­ness en­vir­on­ment and high rank­ing on the Ease of Do­ing Busi­ness in­dex. The coun­try’s rap­id eco­nom­ic evol­u­tion, coupled with chan­ging norms and cus­toms, cre­ates a fer­tile ground for in­nov­a­tion and busi­ness growth. Ad­di­tion­ally, South Korea's gross na­tion­al in­come per cap­ita has seen a dra­mat­ic rise over the past dec­ades, re­flect­ing a ro­bust and re­si­li­ent eco­nomy.

South Korea is also a glob­al lead­er in tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions and high-tech in­dus­tries, with renowned com­pan­ies that foster a cul­ture of in­nov­a­tion and tech­no­lo­gic­al ad­vance­ment. The coun­try's edu­ca­tion sys­tem is ex­em­plary, with 89% of adults aged 25-64 hav­ing com­pleted up­per sec­ond­ary edu­ca­tion and nearly 70% of 25-34 year-olds hold­ing ter­tiary edu­ca­tion de­grees, sig­ni­fic­antly sur­pass­ing the OECD av­er­age. This highly edu­cated work­force is a key as­set for any busi­ness look­ing to es­tab­lish a strong pres­ence in the re­gion. Fur­ther­more, South Korea is de­scribed as ‘mostly free’ by the In­dex of Eco­nom­ic Free­dom, en­sur­ing a fa­vor­able leg­al en­vir­on­ment for busi­ness op­er­a­tions.

Wibu-Sys­tems’ Ex­pan­sion Over Time

Wibu-Sys­tems’ jour­ney of glob­al ex­pan­sion began with the es­tab­lish­ment of its first over­seas of­fice in the USA in 2001, fol­lowed by its entry in­to China in 2003. In 2018, the com­pany fur­ther ex­ten­ded its reach to Ja­pan, and now, in 2024, it’s ready to open its own busi­ness in South Korea. Along­side these mile­stones, WibuSys­tems has con­tinu­ously ex­pan­ded its net­work of European of­fices and dis­trib­ut­ors world­wide, en­sur­ing com­pre­hens­ive cov­er­age and sup­port for its cus­tom­ers glob­ally.

Since provid­ing loc­al sup­port in the nat­ive lan­guage and ad­her­ing to loc­al prac­tices is cru­cial for suc­cess­ful pre-sales con­sultancy and post-sales sup­port, the new South Korean of­fice, WIBU-SYS­TEMS Korea Ltd., will ini­tially fo­cus on pro­mot­ing Code­Meter tech­no­logy, the com­pany’s flag­ship soft­ware pro­tec­tion and li­cens­ing solu­tions.

Look­ing ahead, Wibu-Sys­tems plans to fur­ther in­vest in the South Korean mar­ket by ex­pand­ing its loc­al team, fine-tun­ing its product port­fo­lio and tail­or­ing it to the re­gion, and for­ging stra­tegic part­ner­ships with loc­al busi­nesses and aca­dem­ic in­sti­tu­tions.

Oliv­er Win­zen­ried, CEO and Founder of WIBU-SYS­TEMS AG, headquartered in Ger­many, ex­pressed his pride in the com­pany's glob­al leg­acy: “The open­ing of our South Korean of­fice marks a sig­ni­fic­ant mile­stone in our stra­tegic growth plan. By trans­ition­ing from dis­tri­bu­tion to es­tab­lish­ing our own of­fice, we are bet­ter po­si­tioned to provide tailored solu­tions and ded­ic­ated sup­port to our South Korean cus­tom­ers. This move re­flects our com­mit­ment to build­ing a glob­al leg­acy and re­in­for­cing our mar­ket lead­er­ship in cy­ber­se­cur­ity and soft­ware mon­et­iz­a­tion.”

With a high edu­ca­tion in tech­no­logy, vast ex­per­i­ence in busi­ness de­vel­op­ment, and seni­or roles with­in large mul­tina­tion­al cor­por­a­tions, mainly in the tech­no­logy area, Jun­g­Jae Kim was ap­poin­ted Sales Dir­ect­or for the launch of this ini­ti­at­ive of WibuSys­tems in South Korea.

Jun­g­Jae Kim, Wibu-Sys­tems’ loc­al Sales Dir­ect­or, shared his en­thu­si­asm: “I am honored to join Wibu-Sys­tems in this ex­cit­ing ven­ture. South Korea's high-tech mar­ket presents tre­mend­ous op­por­tun­it­ies, and I am eager to bring Wibu-Sys­tems' in­nov­at­ive solu­tions to our loc­al cus­tom­ers. As I fa­mil­i­ar­ize my­self with the mar­ket and our tech­no­logy, I am con­fid­ent that our new of­fice will be­come a vi­tal hub for growth and cus­tom­er suc­cess in the re­gion.”
 

The com­pany will take over sales and con­sult­ing dir­ectly. The fo­cus of the newly foun­ded FAUL­HABER Dan­mark ApS is on strength­en­ing cus­tom­er prox­im­ity. Mireille Deck­ers-Strobel, Head of Glob­al Sales at FAUL­HABER, sum­mar­izes: “Our drive sys­tems are known in the glob­al mar­ket for their per­form­ance and qual­ity. Fol­low­ing the open­ing of our loc­a­tions in the Neth­er­lands, Po­land, Aus­tria and Italy in re­cent years, this fur­ther op­por­tun­ity has now aris­en in north­ern Europe. With our pres­ence in Den­mark, we can un­der­stand the needs of the loc­al mar­kets even bet­ter and be avail­able to our cus­tom­ers in close prox­im­ity.”

By es­tab­lish­ing the loc­a­tion, we are pur­su­ing the op­por­tun­ity to con­sol­id­ate ex­ist­ing re­la­tion­ships and en­sure faster re­sponse times. To achieve this, it is cru­cial to have a loc­al pres­ence. Claus Laur­it­sen will take on this task in fu­ture. He is very fa­mil­i­ar with the loc­al struc­tures and has known FAUL­HABER's cus­tom­ers and products for many years. 
 

"The es­tab­lish­ment of glob­al headquar­ters in Switzer­land marks a fur­ther step for HART­ING in our stra­tegic de­vel­op­ment and in­ter­na­tion­al­isa­tion, with the aim of be­ing po­si­tioned as glob­ally com­pet­it­ive and re­gion­ally power­ful. In this way, we are also meet­ing the glob­al frame­work con­di­tions and the re­quire­ments of our cus­tom­ers," states Philip Hart­ing, CEO of the HART­ING Tech­no­logy Group.

HART­ING has been op­er­at­ing in Switzer­land for over 40 years. The com­pany main­tains a pro­duc­tion site there and is already man­aging its glob­al In­nov­a­tion Hubs from Switzer­land, among oth­er things. "To­geth­er with Studer Cables AG (Däniken/Switzer­land), which the Hart­ing fam­ily ac­quired two years ago, we want to drive the de­vel­op­ment of con­nect­or and cable solu­tions for­ward and cre­ate ad­ded value for our cus­tom­ers," as Philip Hart­ing, CEO of the HART­ING Tech­no­logy Group and Chair­man of the Board of Dir­ect­ors of Studer Cables AG, un­der­lined. Plan­ning for glob­al headquar­ters in Switzer­land is still at an early stage.

Philip Hart­ing is con­vinced that the es­tab­lish­ment of headquar­ters in Switzer­land will have a pos­it­ive im­pact on the com­pany with its ap­prox­im­ately 6,000 em­ploy­ees world­wide, and that the Tech­no­logy Group will con­tin­ue to chart a suc­cess­ful course. The move is in­ten­ded to se­cure jobs and in­vest­ments in Ger­many, Switzer­land and world­wide over the long term. At the same time, Ger­many, Es­pelkamp and the sur­round­ing area re­main a cent­ral an­chor point for the Hart­ing fam­ily. The headquar­ters of HART­ING Stif­tung & Co. KG will re­main in Es­pelkamp. The nu­mer­ous on­go­ing projects and ini­ti­at­ives in the re­gion will be con­tin­ued. 
 

The part­ner­ship com­bines Aet­ina’s cut­ting-edge NVIDIA Jet­son Orin mod­ule with Tupl’s ro­bust AI En­gine, TuplOS, which spe­cial­izes in AI-driv­en auto­ma­tion, to form a new tech­no­lo­gic­al eco­sys­tem. This eco­sys­tem is de­signed to tackle tra­di­tion­al chal­lenges in man­u­fac­tur­ing such as re­li­ance on manu­al labor, in­con­sist­en­cies in pro­duc­tion, and costly im­ple­ment­a­tions of man­u­fac­tur­ing lines across the globe. This col­lab­or­a­tion of­fers a user-friendly, read­ily con­fig­ur­able, and scal­able solu­tion for Auto­mated Op­tic­al In­spec­tion (AOI) per­formed at the edge, en­han­cing op­er­a­tion­al ef­fi­ciency and pro­ductiv­ity for any cus­tom­er. This part­ner­ship en­ables the de­ploy­ment of Aet­ina’s em­bed­ded devices in­teg­rated with Tupl’s AI-QA auto­mated in­spec­tion solu­tion. 

“We are very happy to an­nounce this part­ner­ship, which brings two in­nov­at­ive com­pan­ies to­geth­er to de­liv­er end-to-end, AI powered solu­tions at the edge”, ex­plains Pablo Tapia, Chief Tech­no­logy Of­ficer at Tupl. “We have been lever­aging Aet­ina’s Jet­son devices in our AI Vis­ion projects in sev­er­al factor­ies, and we are ex­tremely happy with their per­form­ance. We are also very grate­ful for the great sup­port provided by Aet­ina en­gin­eers, work­ing head-to-head with us to help over­come tech­nic­al chal­lenges”.

This stra­tegic al­li­ance strengthens both com­pan­ies. “The uni­on of Tupl’s AI-driv­en auto­ma­tion soft­ware and Aet­ina’s high-per­form­ing NVIDIA Jet­son Orin-powered devices en­ables the im­ple­ment­a­tion of more ro­bust Edge AI vis­ion solu­tions for factor­ies world­wide”, states Kuankuan Cao, Re­gion­al Busi­ness United Head – EMEA at Aet­ina. “Bey­ond man­u­fac­tur­ing, this col­lab­or­a­tion has the po­ten­tial to in­nov­ate ver­tic­als like ag­ri­cul­ture and farm­ing, where AI-powered in­spec­tion solu­tions could re­vo­lu­tion­ize pro­cesses”.
The col­lab­or­a­tion not only aims to re­fine ex­ist­ing sys­tems but also to dis­cov­er new ways to in­teg­rate Edge AI tech­no­logy for en­hanced pro­ductiv­ity and ef­fi­ciency across vari­ous op­er­a­tion­al land­scapes.

The con­struc­tion work at the JUMO SENSILO plant in the Fulda-West Tech­no­logy Park con­tin­ues to make rap­id pro­gress. The next ma­jor step will be the re­lo­ca­tion in Oc­to­ber, as JUMO Man­aging Dir­ect­or Dr. Stef­fen Hoßfeld ex­plained to Fulda's Lord May­or Dr. Heiko Win­gen­feld and City Plan­ning Of­ficer Daniel Schrein­er dur­ing a tour of the site. At 50 mil­lion euros, the new build­ing is the largest in­vest­ment in JUMO's his­tory.

"We are cre­at­ing the fu­ture here, we are cre­at­ing growth", em­phas­ized Hoßfeld. Ac­cord­ing to Hoßfeld, the new build­ing is primar­ily about di­git­al­iz­a­tion, ma­ter­i­al flow op­tim­iz­a­tion, re­duc­tion of cost struc­tures and thus ul­ti­mately about ef­fi­ciency gains in or­der to sur­vive in glob­al com­pet­i­tion. JUMO is build­ing a fact­ory of the fu­ture on a green­field site in Rodges, primar­ily to re­duce unit costs by us­ing state-of-the-art tech­no­logy.

JUMO is still on sched­ule, em­phas­ized project man­ager Stefan Reith. The costs also re­main with­in the planned frame­work. The en­tire team is highly mo­tiv­ated and the in­di­vidu­al trades are work­ing hand in hand, he ex­plained. For this project, the de­cision was made to im­ple­ment in­teg­rated project man­age­ment. The con­struc­tion con­tract­ors are in­teg­rated in­to the project right from the start of the plan­ning phase. This en­sures that every­one in­volved in the project can work out an op­tim­al solu­tion right from the start. "This part­ner­ship-based pro­cess is very in­nov­at­ive, saves costs and pro­tects against po­ten­tial law­suits", says Reith.

Com­mit­ment to the Fulda site

Chris­ti­an Gies, Head of Fa­cil­ity Man­age­ment, was im­pressed by the know-how and ex­pert­ise of the com­pan­ies in­volved. "The trade firms and part­ner com­pan­ies here in the re­gion have enorm­ous ex­pert­ise and years of ex­per­i­ence. This is an­oth­er reas­on for the rap­id con­struc­tion pro­gress so far", em­phas­ized Gies.

"The new JUMO SENSILO plant is a clear com­mit­ment to the Fulda loc­a­tion and strengthens the eco­nom­ic power of the en­tire re­gion", said Fulda's Lord May­or Dr. Heiko Win­gen­feld. City plan­ning of­ficer Daniel Schrein­er praised the good co­oper­a­tion with JUMO: "The pro­cess from plan­ning to im­ple­ment­a­tion with the JUMO con­struc­tion man­agers was char­ac­ter­ized by a high de­gree of re­li­ab­il­ity", said Schrein­er.

Pro­duc­tion area of around 13,000 square meters

JUMO is build­ing a plant for the pro­duc­tion of tem­per­at­ure and pres­sure sensors in the tech­no­logy park with a pro­duc­tion area of around 13,000 square meters. These product areas have re­cently ex­per­i­enced above-av­er­age growth; JUMO also sees great po­ten­tial here in the com­ing years.

JUMO plans to double the pro­duc­tion volume of tem­per­at­ure sensors by 2026 com­pared to 2022, as Dr. Mi­chael Schwander, Head of Pro­duc­tion Tem­per­at­ure Sensor Tech­no­logy, ex­plained. The pro­duc­tion of pres­sure sensors will also be­come sig­ni­fic­antly more ef­fi­cient. "The cur­rent five areas in dif­fer­ent build­ings and floors in Plant 1 will now be con­cen­trated in a single loc­a­tion in the new plant as a res­ult of the move", said Schwander.

Geo­therm­al plant cov­ers peak load

Ac­cord­ing to cur­rent plans, JUMO will com­pletely dis­pense with fossil fuels. A geo­therm­al sys­tem will be used to sup­port the heat­ing sys­tem. This will cov­er the peak load, while the base load will be com­pletely covered by heat re­cov­ery from the pro­duc­tion pro­cesses. The new plant's cool­ing and vent­il­a­tion sys­tems will be op­er­ated primar­ily with self-gen­er­ated elec­tri­city from a photo­vol­ta­ic sys­tem.
 

IEN Europe: Can you please briefly in­tro­duce our read­ers to the new D-Bot series, which was show­cased for the first time at the Han­nov­er Messe? What are the high­lights?
May­er-Rosa: The new D-Bot series is our first co­bot fam­ily. We have de­veloped six dif­fer­ent mod­els, each of which has six axes and weighs between 26 and 85 kg. De­pend­ing on the mod­el, pay­loads of 6 to 30 kg are moved at a speed of up to 200° per second, with a range of 800 to 1800 mm. This al­lows us to achieve a pre­ci­sion and re­peat­ab­il­ity of ±0.02 mm and fur­ther­more, the in­teg­ra­tion of 24-bit en­coders en­sures a con­sist­ent per­form­ance. With this D-Bot series, we are in­tro­du­cing the next stage in the de­vel­op­ment of col­lab­or­at­ive ro­bot­ics, adding an im­port­ant build­ing block to our auto­ma­tion port­fo­lio.

But that's not all. Oth­er high­lights in­clude the fact that the D-Bots come with a wide range of func­tion­al­it­ies such as Pick & Place, Pal­let­iz­ing, Ma­chine Tend­ing and Weld­ing as 'ready-to-use' apps. In ad­di­tion, no spe­cial pro­gram­ming know­ledge is re­quired – thanks to 'Plug & Play', the mo­tion se­quences can be spe­cified, and the com­mand ex­e­cu­tion de­scribed in no time at all. An­oth­er ad­vant­age is the high level of flex­ib­il­ity re­gard­ing the sup­por­ted in­ter­faces: Eth­er­CAT, CAN Bus, IO Link and Mod­bus are sup­por­ted – as is the man­u­fac­turer-in­de­pend­ent Codesys de­vel­op­ment en­vir­on­ment, which we use to max­im­ize the ef­fi­ciency of the co­bots while en­sur­ing max­im­um vari­ab­il­ity. Teach­ing is also simple via drag & drop or via Py­thon, ROS 1 or C++.

IEN Europe: How do you see the new product series in re­la­tion to the ex­ist­ing Delta Ro­bot­ics port­fo­lio?
May­er-Rosa: With the new D-Bot series, we are not only ex­pand­ing our port­fo­lio of SCARA ro­bots and clas­sic in­dus­tri­al ro­bots, we are also ex­pand­ing our range and at the same time re­spond­ing to ur­gent ques­tions from in­dustry in times of a short­age of skilled work­ers. Our co­bots are de­signed so that they can be used quickly and eas­ily – without the need for any in-depth pro­gram­ming know­ledge. They are also equipped with safety fea­tures – in the spir­it of col­lab­or­at­ive ro­bot­ics – that en­able them to work to­geth­er without the need for light bar­ri­ers and cages, as is the case with in­dus­tri­al ro­bots. At this point, in con­trast to oth­er co­bots, we went one step fur­ther and made ad­di­tion­al pro­vi­sions for col­lab­or­a­tion between hu­mans and ma­chines with our switch­able Re­flex Safety func­tion. In­stead of stop­ping and re­main­ing in po­s­i­tion when en­coun­ter­ing res­ist­ance, as is usu­ally the case, our D-Bots make a short counter-move­ment to en­sure pres­sure re­lief.

IEN Europe: This is a com­pletely in-house de­vel­op­ment, from the ground up. What ad­vant­ages does Delta ex­pect to gain from this?
May­er-Rosa: This means that we can of­fer our cus­tom­ers ad­vice, sup­port and as­sist­ance with all their auto­ma­tion needs and can sup­ply everything from a single source, both in terms of hard­ware and soft­ware. However, if we look at the mar­ket, we quickly real­ize that the short­age of skilled work­ers will be one of the most press­ing prob­lems of the fu­ture. There are few com­pan­ies that are not com­plain­ing about a short­age of young tal­ent - while at the same time ex­per­i­enced em­ploy­ees are re­tir­ing. Mar­ket re­search­ers pre­dict an an­nu­al growth of 20 per­cent in the field of col­lab­or­at­ive ro­bot­ics by 2032 – and with our European pro­duced and de­veloped D-Bots, we are provid­ing a product that fits in­to our ex­ist­ing smart man­u­fac­tur­ing port­fo­lio for this very mar­ket. As a res­ult, we have be­come an even more in­ter­est­ing solu­tion pro­vider for our cus­tom­ers – and the already shown in­terest for our new co­bots so far proves us right.

IEN Europe: What range of tasks can the new series cov­er? Are there par­tic­u­lar areas of ap­plic­a­tion and in­dus­tri­al sec­tors for which they are par­tic­u­larly suit­able?
May­er-Rosa: With the co­bots, we are tar­get­ing cus­tom­ers in in­dus­tries and sec­tors such as the auto­mot­ive and elec­tron­ics in­dus­tries, as well as lo­gist­ics. The D-Bots are not only suit­able for ma­chine pick­ing, but also for use in as­sembly, pack­aging and ma­ter­i­al hand­ling, mak­ing them ideal for the clas­sic end user with a ma­chine park. An­oth­er ad­vant­age here is the cer­ti­fic­a­tion with pro­tec­tion class IP66, which en­ables the use in in­dus­tries where things can get a little rough and clean­ing with steam jets is ne­ces­sary.

Our co­bots are de­signed for col­lab­or­a­tion between hu­mans and ro­bot­ics as well as for use in ap­plic­a­tions that re­quire high pre­ci­sion and re­peat­ab­il­ity - this also in­cludes col­lab­or­a­tion between sev­er­al co­bots. With the D-Bots, we can now of­fer a more com­pre­hens­ive range of solu­tions to meet in­di­vidu­al re­quire­ments. Ac­cord­ingly, we cre­ate im­mense po­ten­tial for syn­er­gies for our cus­tom­ers and provide them with a com­pre­hens­ive auto­ma­tion strategy to­wards a fu­ture-proof smart fact­ory through our en­tire product port­fo­lio.

IEN Europe: Delta Elec­tron­ics is known for its strong com­mit­ment to en­ergy ef­fi­ciency. To what ex­tent does this also ap­ply to the new co­bot series?
May­er-Rosa: Our goal as a com­pany is to opt for the most re­source-sav­ing and en­ergy-ef­fi­cient ap­proach pos­sible for new products. That's why we have also fo­cused on this in the de­vel­op­ment of the D-Bot series and are us­ing the most sus­tain­able sources pos­sible for pro­duc­tion and the ma­ter­i­als used. One ex­ample is the in­teg­ra­tion of a con­ven­tion­al tab­let as a cent­ral con­trol unit and handy HMI, which is part of our co­bot pack­age. It is im­port­ant to look at the big pic­ture here: Our co­bots are an in­teg­ral part of Delta's hol­ist­ic auto­ma­tion port­fo­lio and there­fore op­er­ate in a sus­tain­able and ef­fi­cient product en­vir­on­ment.

IEN Europe: If you look in­to the fu­ture, what de­vel­op­ments do you ex­pect for col­lab­or­at­ive ro­bot­ics, e.g. in terms of load ranges or reach?
May­er-Rosa: Even though our present­a­tion and mar­ket launch of our D-Bots only took place a few months ago, we are of course build­ing on this mo­mentum and are already de­vel­op­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of co­bots to set new stand­ards. While I don't want to give too much away just yet to keep the ex­cite­ment go­ing, it's worth look­ing at the gen­er­al de­vel­op­ment of col­lab­or­at­ive ro­bot­ics: the mar­ket will con­tin­ue to ex­pand in the fu­ture – es­pe­cially re­gard­ing the in­teg­ra­tion of AI. This makes it all the more im­port­ant to be aware of the pos­sib­il­it­ies of this tech­no­logy today.

If we look at the areas of pay­load and reach you have chosen, for ex­ample, we have already reached a very ex­tens­ive mar­ket cov­er­age with our co­bots. However, one ques­tion arises, par­tic­u­larly re­gard­ing reach: If co­bots should already be seen as new col­leagues with­in man­u­fac­tur­ing, why shouldn't they be able to be just as flex­ible and mo­bile on the road as reg­u­lar em­ploy­ees? The use of AM­Rs will be part of every­day life in many com­pan­ies in the fu­ture – and it is not dif­fi­cult to ima­gine that a com­bin­a­tion with col­lab­or­at­ive ro­bots could also be a prof­it­able solu­tion in the fu­ture. We are already work­ing on the top­ic of di­git­al twins in pro­duc­tion, where all types of ro­bot­ics will be im­ple­men­ted.

IEN Europe: Thank you for your time and in­sights.
 

With the new Dock­er-based soft­ware mod­ule edge­Con­nect­or Al­len-Brad­ley PLC from Soft­ing In­dus­tri­al, users can eas­ily con­nect to their Con­trol­Lo­gix and Com­pact­Lo­gix con­trol­lers. The data from the con­trol­lers is made avail­able on edge devices or vir­tu­al en­vir­on­ments via OPC Uni­fied Ar­chi­tec­ture (OPC UA) and Mes­sage Queuing Tele­metry Trans­port (MQTT). This en­ables flex­ible in­teg­ra­tion in­to on-premises or cloud en­vir­on­ments without modi­fy­ing the ex­ist­ing Pro­gram­mable Lo­gic Con­trol­ler (PLC) con­fig­ur­a­tion.

edge­Con­nect­or Al­len-Brad­ley PLC is easy to con­fig­ure loc­ally via an in­teg­rated web in­ter­face. Al­tern­at­ively, re­mote glob­al mass con­fig­ur­a­tions are pos­sible via Rep­res­ent­a­tion­al State Trans­fer Ap­plic­a­tion Pro­gram­ming In­ter­face (REST API).

Bridging gaps in com­mu­nic­a­tion

There are now five edge­Con­nect­or products avail­able for the most com­mon con­trol sys­tems. Be­sides the new edge­Con­nect­or Al­len-Brad­ley PLC, these are edge­Con­nect­or Siemens, edge­Con­nect­or 840D, edge­Con­nect­or Fa­nuc CNC, and edge­Con­nect­or Mod­bus. All edge­Con­nect­or products can be de­ployed very quickly thanks to con­tain­er­ized tech­no­logy. They are op­er­ated on stand­ard hard­ware and can be eas­ily man­aged cent­rally. The in­teg­rated MQTT pub­lish­er/sub­scriber func­tion­al­ity al­lows In­dus­tri­al In­ter­net of Things (II­oT) solu­tions to be set up flex­ibly. The edge­Con­nect­ors sup­port state-of-the-art se­cur­ity stand­ards such as SSL/TLS, X.509 cer­ti­fic­ates, au­then­tic­a­tion, and data en­cryp­tion. This gives users a simple and se­cure way to in­teg­rate data from pro­duc­tion in­to in­nov­at­ive and flex­ible II­oT solu­tions.

The Dock­er-based edge­Con­nect­or product fam­ily ad­dresses the grow­ing need for in­teg­ra­tion in­ter­faces in soft­ware that can be op­er­ated on stand­ard hard­ware and can be man­aged ef­fi­ciently. The goal is to sup­port users and sys­tem in­teg­rat­ors in bridging the gap between OT and IT.
 

De­veloped in con­junc­tion with ul­tra-high-defin­i­tion video cam­era spe­cial­ists Sen from Lon­don, UK, the new 406-000 f2 ra­di­ation res­ist­ant lens from Re­solve Op­tics is in­cor­por­ated with­in an op­tic­al mod­ule which can eas­ily be re­moved and se­cured in a wide vari­ety of dif­fer­ent mounts.

Rob Watkin­son, sales man­ager at Re­solve Op­tics said “Our new op­tic­al mod­ule sys­tem provides Sen with the flex­ib­il­ity to use the same high-per­form­ance video cam­era lens no mat­ter which part­ner they de­cide to launch with. Of­fer­ing a fo­cal length of 75mm the new 406-000 is the latest ad­di­tion to the grow­ing range of lenses we have de­veloped for Sen to cov­er a vari­ety of GSD (ground sampling dis­tance) ap­plic­a­tions. Pre­vi­ous lenses sup­plied to Sen have already been de­ployed in­to space and are gen­er­at­ing amaz­ing 4K im­ages of the Earth and Space”.

Com­bin­a­tion ofl low mass and high per­form­ance

Com­mer­cially avail­able cam­era lenses are gen­er­ally not suit­able for space ap­plic­a­tions be­cause the op­tic­al ma­ter­i­al from which they are made would in­creas­ingly suf­fer from ra­di­ation ‘brown­ing’ – mean­ing that im­age qual­ity will de­teri­or­ate over the life­time of the satel­lite. Re­solve Op­tics is a mar­ket lead­er in the design and sup­ply of space ready lenses be­cause of its ex­pert­ise in cus­tom design­ing low mass, high per­form­ance lenses us­ing ra­di­ation res­ist­ant glass that meet the harsh de­mands of rock­et launch and the tem­per­at­ure, cos­mic ra­di­ation and va­cu­um chal­lenges posed by the space en­vir­on­ment.

Sen uses its own satel­lites and hos­ted cam­er­as in space to gath­er news and in­form­a­tion about what’s hap­pen­ing on Earth and in space. Sen aim is to make its videos freely ac­cess­ible to con­sumers via an app, em­power­ing people to see changes on Earth and take ap­pro­pri­ate ac­tion. Sen also of­fers its videos to busi­nesses who wish to ana­lyse the im­agery to de­rive in­sights that are rel­ev­ant and valu­able to their busi­ness. 

The new uEye XS from IDS Ima­ging De­vel­op­ment Sys­tems weighs just 12 grams and, at just 26.4 x 23 x 21.7 mm, fits in­to al­most any ap­plic­a­tion. Thanks to its auto­fo­cus and 5MP CMOS sensor, it de­liv­ers con­sist­ently sharp im­ages and video from a dis­tance of just 10cm. It can be used in hand-held scan­ners, ro­bot­ic arms or pass­port photo ma­chines, for ex­ample. The uEye XS starter kit is ideal for test­ing the cam­era. In ad­di­tion to the com­pact USB2 cam­era, it in­cludes a cable, tri­pod ad­apter and tri­pod.

SDK avail­able

When the dis­tance between the lens and the ob­ject is con­stantly chan­ging, users be­ne­fit from in­dus­tri­al cam­er­as with auto­fo­cus. They elim­in­ate the need for manu­al re­fo­cus­ing and en­sure that ob­jects or la­bels are al­ways per­fectly vis­ible. However, im­age qual­ity de­pends on oth­er factors as well, such as nat­ur­al col­our re­pro­duc­tion and har­mo­ni­ous con­trast. IDS has there­fore equipped the uEye XS with many oth­er prac­tic­al auto­mat­ic fea­tures fa­mil­i­ar from con­sumer tech­no­logy. These in­clude white bal­ance, ex­pos­ure and gain. The res­ult is the best pos­sible res­ult in every situ­ation. The SDK (IDS Soft­ware Suite) al­lows users to fine-tune the set­tings.

Thanks to its small size and proven USB2 in­ter­face, the uEye XS cam­era is suit­able as a com­pon­ent in em­bed­ded vis­ion sys­tems. For ex­ample, it can be used in med­ic­al or se­cur­ity ap­plic­a­tions, in trans­port and lo­gist­ics or in kiosk sys­tems.
 

Red Li­on® is pleased to an­nounce the launch of the N-Tron® NT116 un­man­aged in­dus­tri­al Eth­er­net switch. The NT116 is de­signed for in­dus­tri­al ap­plic­a­tions that re­quire re­li­able per­form­ance for mis­sion-crit­ic­al ap­plic­a­tions in harsh en­vir­on­ments. The NT116 un­man­aged switch provides ex­cep­tion­al re­li­ab­il­ity and per­form­ance for data ac­quis­i­tion, Eth­er­net I/O and pro­cess con­trol. Housed in a rugged in­dus­tri­al met­al en­clos­ure, the unit is com­pact in size and fea­tures 16 high-per­form­ance cop­per ports (10/100BaseTX RJ45). The NT116 of­fers high shock and vi­bra­tion tol­er­ance. All ports have built-in ESD and surge pro­tec­tion. Users be­ne­fit from an ex­cep­tion­al MT­BF rat­ing of 1.2 mil­lion hours. All this in a slim, space-sav­ing design that op­er­ates from -40°C to 85°C. 

For ro­bust net­work sup­port 

The NT116 sup­ports full wire speed com­mu­nic­a­tions with up to 3.2Gb/s through­put. It uses store-and-for­ward tech­no­logy and sup­ports full and half-du­plex op­er­a­tion. Two 10-49 VDC power in­puts are provided for re­dund­ancy.

In ad­di­tion to IEEE 802.3 com­pli­ance and mar­ine, rail­way and rolling stock cer­ti­fic­a­tions, the new switch has UL Or­din­ary and Haz­ard­ous loc­a­tions as well as ATEX and IECEx cer­ti­fic­a­tions. The new switch makes it easi­er to col­lect crit­ic­al per­form­ance data. Its rugged and hardened design provides the dur­ab­il­ity and re­li­ab­il­ity needed to with­stand the ex­treme con­di­tions found in con­trol net­works on the fact­ory floor and in ap­plic­a­tions such as oil and gas, util­it­ies, waste wa­ter treat­ment, al­tern­at­ive en­ergy, rail­ways, in­tel­li­gent traffic con­trol and trans­port­a­tion.
 

Schmersal is set to launch four new elec­tromech­an­ic­al safety switches with sep­ar­ate ac­tu­at­or: the AZ215/AZ216 and AZ315/AZ316 switches handle safety guard po­s­i­tion mon­it­or­ing of side­ways or ro­tat­ing guard doors. Their stand-out fea­ture is the ro­tat­ing ac­tu­at­or head made from die-cast zinc, which can be eas­ily ro­tated in 90° in­cre­ments be­fore in­stall­a­tion. This al­lows the head to be ap­proached from the side from four dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions, as well as from above. With this ver­sat­ile ap­proach po­s­i­tion and pos­sib­il­ity of com­bin­a­tion with dif­fer­ent ac­tu­at­ors, the AZ series of­fers max­im­um flex­ib­il­ity in in­stall­a­tion, as well as a range of uni­ver­sal us­age op­tions to the user. The de­sign­er can use the AZ switch both for right-hand and left-hand design on ro­tat­ing and slid­ing guard doors. 

M20- and M12-cabling op­tions

The plastic or met­al switch hous­ing is con­sist­ent in design and size with the PS 215/216 and PS 315/316 series po­s­i­tion switches, giv­ing the AZ switches an equally com­pact design and easy in­teg­ra­tion in­to the sur­round­ing con­struc­tion. The small AZ215 and AZ216 switches are con­sist­ent with stand­ard EN 50047, while the lar­ger AZ315 and AZ316 switches sat­is­fy stand­ard EN 50041. In ad­di­tion to the stand­ard ver­sion with M20 cable entry and con­nec­tion ter­min­als, ver­sions with 4 or 8-pin M12 con­nect­or are also avail­able, de­pend­ing on the num­ber of con­tacts. With the in-built 8-pin con­nect­or, AZ switches can be con­nec­ted to the SFB Safety Field­box. Device ver­sions with three con­tacts in a wide range of com­bin­a­tions can also as­sume a sig­nalling role in ad­di­tion to their safety func­tion. The con­nec­tion ter­min­als on the switch ele­ments, which are ro­tated by 45°, en­able quick and easy wir­ing.
 

The new Ewon Net­biter EC360W is an all-in-one gate­way for world­wide use. This new mod­el in­cludes a di­versity an­tenna, mak­ing it more ro­bust and en­sur­ing bet­ter con­nectiv­ity in harsh en­vir­on­ments. Ad­di­tion­ally, the launch of the Net­biter Ar­gos app of­fers new op­por­tun­it­ies for ser­vice teams to man­age no­ti­fic­a­tions. 

The Ewon Net­biter EC360W con­nects field equip­ment to the Ar­gos cloud via Cel­lu­lar 4G or Eth­er­net, fa­cil­it­at­ing seam­less data ex­change. The device's dual-an­tenna setup en­sures re­li­able com­mu­nic­a­tion even in the most chal­len­ging con­di­tions. The cloud plat­form dis­plays data via both the web and the new Ar­gos mo­bile app. With the new Ar­gos mo­bile app, users can re­ceive and man­age no­ti­fic­a­tions. They will now be able to re­spond to alarms faster and more ef­fi­ciently, en­han­cing the mon­it­or­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies and re­spons­ive­ness of this man­age­ment sys­tem.

Re­mote man­age­ment of a wide equip­ment range  

With the Net­biter EC360W gate­way and the Net­biter Ar­gos cloud, users can en­joy com­pre­hens­ive in­sights in­to their equip­ment’s per­form­ance and status. The solu­tion al­lows re­mote man­age­ment of a wide range of field equip­ment spread across the globe: power gen­er­at­ors, air com­pressors, chillers, and many more. It is ideal for en­sur­ing the con­tinu­ous per­form­ance and main­ten­ance of crit­ic­al equip­ment, even in re­mote loc­a­tions.

The Net­biter Ar­gos solu­tion is per­fectly suited for rent­al com­pan­ies that man­age and mon­it­or vari­ous as­sets used for power gen­er­a­tion. Of­fer­ing an out-of-the-box, end-to-end solu­tion, it al­lows these busi­nesses to ef­fect­ively track and ser­vice di­verse fleets of equip­ment de­ployed across nu­mer­ous loc­a­tions. Net­biter Ar­gos is ideal for com­pan­ies whose equip­ment de­mands con­stant su­per­vi­sion. It en­sures max­im­um op­er­a­tion­al ef­fi­ciency and up­time. Ad­di­tion­ally, it's a scal­able, fu­ture-proof solu­tion de­signed to handle ex­pand­ing fleets of equip­ment seam­lessly.
 

Ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) and ro­bot­ics are re­vo­lu­tion­iz­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing, provid­ing scale, speed, and time-to-mar­ket ad­vant­ages. Ac­cord­ing to the World Eco­nom­ic For­um, over 50% of man­u­fac­tur­ers will ad­opt AI by 2025 as these tech­no­lo­gies are prov­ing ef­fect­ive in boost­ing shop floor ef­fi­ciency, qual­ity, and flex­ib­il­ity.

AI gives ro­bot­ics pro­gram­ming and man­u­fac­tur­ing plat­forms un­pre­ced­en­ted ad­apt­ab­il­ity, scale and speed. AI and ro­bot­ics also are the cata­lysts that en­able man­u­fac­tur­ers to achieve more in less time and at a lower cost. Auto­mat­ing re­pet­it­ive, dan­ger­ous, or er­go­nom­ic­ally tax­ing manu­al tasks, in­clud­ing heavy lift­ing, ma­ter­i­als hand­ling, and as­sembly is just the start of these two tech­no­lo­gies’ many con­tri­bu­tions to man­u­fac­tur­ing.  

Com­bin­ing ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and ro­bot­ics across shop floors also auto­mates qual­ity in­spec­tion, where AI helps re­duce de­fects and scrap. The growth op­por­tun­it­ies for AI and ro­bot­ics in man­u­fac­tur­ing are vast and pro­jec­ted to reach $182 bil­lion glob­ally by 2027. Com­pan­ies that fail to ad­opt these ex­po­nen­tially ad­van­cing tech­no­lo­gies as part of their pro­cess risk fall­ing be­hind, as smart factor­ies powered by in­tel­li­gent ma­chines be­come the norm.

In­teg­rat­ing ro­bot­ics and AI is pay­ing off in man­u­fac­tur­ing

In­teg­rat­ing Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence and ro­bot­ics con­tin­ues to re­vo­lu­tion­ize man­u­fac­tur­ing by provid­ing new auto­mated meth­ods to im­prove pro­duc­tion ef­fi­ciency and qual­ity while re­du­cing costs. Powered by the data AI and ma­chine learn­ing al­gorithms pro­duce, ro­bots can now per­form com­plex manu­al tasks with un­matched pre­ci­sion and speed. This auto­ma­tion provides the ac­cur­acy, scale, and speed man­u­fac­tur­ers need to stay com­pet­it­ive, meet cus­tom­er de­liv­ery dates, and stay com­pet­it­ive dur­ing tur­bu­lent eco­nom­ic times. Key ap­plic­a­tions yield­ing ma­jor be­ne­fits in­clude:

Auto­mat­ing manu­ally re­pet­it­ive, dan­ger­ous tasks

Ro­bot­ic arms with sensors, com­puter vis­ion, and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence can take over heavy lift­ing, ma­ter­i­als hand­ling, as­sembly, and oth­er re­pet­it­ive manu­al work. DELMIA Ro­bot­ics solu­tions provides the pro­gram­ming and sim­u­la­tion tools to en­able this auto­ma­tion with ma­ter­i­al-hand­ling ro­bots. This frees the hu­man work­force for high­er-value func­tions and im­proves safety by re­du­cing er­go­nom­ic strains. Ac­cord­ing to McKin­sey, auto­mat­ing pre­dict­able phys­ic­al work could boost glob­al pro­ductiv­ity by 0.8 to 1.4% an­nu­ally.

En­abling mass cus­tom­iz­a­tion and design-to-man­u­fac­tur­ing

Or­ches­trat­ing AI and ro­bot­ics in com­bin­a­tion with man­u­fac­tur­ing ex­e­cu­tion sys­tems (MES) and en­ter­prise re­source plan­ning (ERP) sys­tems is de­fin­ing the fu­ture of mass cus­tom­iz­a­tion and design-for-man­u­fac­tur­ing. These tech­no­lo­gies en­able man­u­fac­tur­ers to pro­duce cus­tom­ized products at scale prof­it­ably. AI auto­mates re­pet­it­ive design and pro­duc­tion tasks, free­ing en­gin­eers to fo­cus on de­liv­er­ing faster in­nov­a­tion. DELMIA op­tim­izes ro­bot­ic rout­ings, work in­struc­tions for each unique con­fig­ur­a­tion, and is in­teg­ral to en­sur­ing mass cus­tom­iz­a­tion and design-for-man­u­fac­tur­ing strategies suc­ceed.

Ro­bot­ics man­u­fac­tur­ing flex­ibly switches between real-time product vari­ations while en­sur­ing ac­cur­acy and pre­ci­sion. AI op­tim­izes pro­duc­tion plans and lo­gist­ics in real time, tail­or­ing them for mass cus­tom­iz­a­tion. In­tel­li­gent design tools use AI to op­tim­ize man­u­fac­tur­ab­il­ity. To­geth­er, AI and ro­bot­ics amp­li­fy the ad­vant­ages of in­teg­rated design-to-man­u­fac­tur­ing plat­forms, ac­cel­er­at­ing through­put, qual­ity, and prof­it­ab­il­ity. Man­u­fac­tur­ers can now de­liv­er large-scale, small-batch tailored products and cap­ture more rev­en­ue op­por­tun­it­ies.

Op­tim­iz­ing pro­duc­tion plan­ning

DELMIA Ro­bot­ics op­tim­iz­a­tion lever­ages AI al­gorithms to ana­lyze tera­bytes of man­u­fac­tur­ing data, identi­fy­ing pat­terns and an­om­alies for op­tim­iz­ing plan­ning and schedul­ing in real time. AI-based DELMIA tech­niques ef­fect­ively de­tect and pre­dict po­ten­tial pro­duc­tion con­straints and sim­u­late scen­ari­os to min­im­ize down­time and bot­tle­necks.

Com­bin­ing DELMIA Ro­bot­ics’ AI-based man­u­fac­tur­ing in­tel­li­gence, ro­bot­ics sim­u­la­tion, and in­teg­ra­tion with man­u­fac­tur­ing ex­e­cu­tion sys­tems (MES) and en­ter­prise re­source plan­ning (ERP) fur­ther im­proves pro­duc­tion yield rates and qual­ity con­sist­ency across all pro­duc­tion cen­ters. When the in­sights from DELMIA’s uni­fied ro­bot­ics, MES, and ERP data be­come in­grained, it leads to great­er cus­tom­er sat­is­fac­tion, re­peat sales, and prof­it­ab­il­ity.

In­creas­ing pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance ac­cur­acy

Com­bin­ing IoT, II­oT, and Pro­gram­mable Lo­gic Con­trol­ler (PLC) sensors and AI pre­dict­ive ana­lyt­ics min­im­izes un­planned down­time of ma­chinery, in­clud­ing ro­bot­ics across shop floors. Al­gorithms de­tect early per­form­ance an­om­alies and pre­dict main­ten­ance needs be­fore fail­ures oc­cur. In­stead of ri­gid sched­ules, main­ten­ance is per­formed only when re­quired. Ac­cord­ing to PwC, AI-en­abled pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance can re­duce main­ten­ance costs by 10-40% and de­crease over­all down­time by 20-50%. In one case, AI helped a rail com­pany cut un­planned down­time by 35%, sav­ing an es­tim­ated $50 mil­lion. As these ex­amples high­light, pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance powered by AI de­liv­ers ma­jor ef­fi­ciency and cost gains.

DELMIA ro­bot­ics also helps val­id­ate pro­duc­tion sys­tems and ro­bot pro­gram­ming with­in a 3D col­lab­or­at­ive en­vir­on­ment be­fore build­ing the pro­duc­tion sys­tem us­ing Vir­tu­al Twin tech­niques and tech­no­lo­gies. It can also en­able the vir­tu­al com­mis­sion­ing of ro­bot­ics sys­tems to con­firm that they work as ex­pec­ted be­fore the con­trol pro­gram is down­loaded to ac­tu­al equip­ment. This can fur­ther re­duce the risk of fail­ures and op­tim­ize the per­form­ance of ro­bot­ics sys­tems. DELMIA ro­bot­ics is a valu­able tool for en­han­cing pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance with ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence in man­u­fac­tur­ing.

Im­prov­ing qual­ity con­trol

Ro­bots with com­puter vis­ion and AI-based deep learn­ing can in­spect products for de­fects autonom­ously be­fore they leave pro­duc­tion cen­ters, re­du­cing the need for re­turn ma­ter­i­al au­thor­iz­a­tions (RMAs) to cus­tom­ers. This lowers cus­tom­er com­plaints and boosts cus­tom­er loy­alty and trust by catch­ing de­fect­ive products be­fore ship­ment. AI-based al­gorithms learn from the data they cap­ture, ana­lyze, and act on, strength­en­ing the qual­ity muscle memory of pro­duc­tion cen­ters us­ing these tech­no­lo­gies. McKin­sey found that ad­vanced im­age re­cog­ni­tion tech­niques for visu­al in­spec­tion and fault de­tec­tion with AI can in­crease pro­ductiv­ity by up to 50%. McKin­sey also found that AI-based visu­al in­spec­tion with im­age re­cog­ni­tion can im­prove de­fect de­tec­tion rates by up to 90% com­pared to hu­man in­spec­tion. Moreover, DELMIA Ro­bot­ics soft­ware can help val­id­ate and op­tim­ize ro­bot pro­gram­ming and sim­u­la­tion in a Vir­tu­al Twin 3D col­lab­or­at­ive en­vir­on­ment be­fore build­ing the pro­duc­tion sys­tem. This can fur­ther en­hance the per­form­ance and re­li­ab­il­ity of ro­bots for qual­ity in­spec­tion.

De­fin­ing the fu­ture of man­u­fac­tur­ing

Man­u­fac­tur­ing is trans­form­ing with AI and ro­bot­ics, which of­fer scale, speed, and time-to-mar­ket ad­vant­ages. The AI in man­u­fac­tur­ing mar­ket size will grow from $2.3 bil­lion in 2022 to $23.6 bil­lion by 2030, with a 31.1% CAGR. The in­dus­tri­al ro­bot­ics mar­ket will reach $86.6 bil­lion by 2027, up from $50.3 bil­lion in 2021. These num­bers show how AI and ro­bot­ics play a vi­tal role in man­u­fac­tur­ing.

AI and ro­bot­ics power design-to-man­u­fac­tur­ing plat­forms that op­tim­ize com­plex tasks, in­crease qual­ity and pro­ductiv­ity and stream­line cus­tom­ized product de­vel­op­ment. In­tel­li­gent ro­bots work with hu­man work­ers, im­prov­ing flex­ib­il­ity, pre­ci­sion, and safety. AI and ro­bot­ics en­able a com­pany with agile man­u­fac­tur­ing, which al­lows mass per­son­al­iz­a­tion and on-de­mand pro­duc­tion, meet­ing cus­tom­er de­mand and sup­ply chain dy­nam­ics.

AI and ro­bot­ics make the factor­ies of the fu­ture smarter and more ef­fi­cient. Man­u­fac­tur­ers need to use these ex­po­nen­tial tech­no­lo­gies to gain a com­pet­it­ive ad­vant­age. DELMIA Ro­bot­ics soft­ware helps man­u­fac­tur­ers val­id­ate and op­tim­ize ro­bot pro­gram­ming and sim­u­la­tion in a 3D col­lab­or­at­ive en­vir­on­ment be­fore build­ing the pro­duc­tion sys­tem. This re­duces the risk of fail­ures, saves time and cost, and im­proves the per­form­ance and re­li­ab­il­ity of ro­bots for vari­ous pro­duc­tion pro­cesses.

Au­thor: Louis Colum­bus, in­dustry mar­ket­ing man­ager at DELMIA
 

Me­dia res­ist­ant re­l­at­ive pres­sure sensors like the MS5547 from AM­SYS are used in very dif­fer­ent areas, such as in med­ic­al tech­no­logy, but also in e-ci­gar­ettes. Both a biocom­pat­ible sil­ic­one gel and a par­tic­u­larly ro­bust Flour gel are avail­able. The new MS5547 of­fers max­im­um ac­cur­acy in the range of -200 ... +2200 mbar. The pres­sure and tem­per­at­ure data can be read out in 24-bit format via I²C or SPI. The 11 cor­rec­tion coef­fi­cients stored in the sensor en­able ex­tern­al com­pens­a­tion down to an ac­cur­acy (TEB) of less than 5 mbar.

Suit­able for re­flow sol­der­ing

The biocom­pat­ible plastic hous­ing is sealed with a 2 x 1 mm² O-ring and the over­all size of the sensor is only 4 x 4 x 4.4 mm³. The sensor is ex­posed to at­mo­spher­ic pres­sure through a little hole in the ceram­ic un­der the sensor. The sensors are suit­able for re­flow sol­der­ing and are of course RoHS and REACH com­pli­ant.
 

The pres­sure to­wards sus­tain­ab­il­ity is push­ing the oil, gas and en­ergy sec­tors to evolve in­nov­at­ive and di­verse solu­tions in a move to cre­ate an en­ergy ef­fi­cient fu­ture. Ma­jor trans­form­a­tions with­in the oil and gas in­dustry in the form of ad­opt­ing sus­tain­able prac­tices, de­vel­op­ing new rev­en­ue streams and push­ing the bound­ar­ies of tech­no­logy, are be­ing tri­alled and de­liv­er­ing suc­cess. Ex­pand­ing in­to new areas such as re­new­able en­ergy, ad­vanced chem­ic­als and bio­fuels, is driv­ing in­nov­a­tion and di­ver­si­fic­a­tion.

Ti­tan En­ter­prises provides op­tim­ised and cus­tom de­signed li­quid flow meas­ure­ment solu­tions for oil, pet­ro­chem­ic­al and green en­ergy ap­plic­a­tions for OEM cus­tom­ers. These have in­cluded be­spoke oval gear flow meters for mar­ine fuel flow meas­ure­ment, mon­it­or­ing the volume of grease lub­ric­at­ing wind tur­bine bear­ing mech­an­isms, high pres­sure in­trins­ic­ally safe units for off­shore oil drilling ad­dit­ive in­jec­tion, and for biod­ies­el plants con­vert­ing bio waste in­to sus­tain­able bio­fuels.

Mon­it­or­ing grease lub­ric­a­tion flow in wind tur­bines  

One of the fun­da­ment­al re­quire­ments for en­sur­ing re­li­able and ef­fi­cient wind tur­bine op­er­a­tion is to keep the heav­ily loaded main bear­ings fully lub­ric­ated in all op­er­at­ing con­di­tions. Fully IP65 / NEMA 4 com­pli­ant, Ti­tan’s com­pact oval gear flow­met­ers are op­tim­ised for meas­ur­ing the flow of vis­cous li­quids. De­signed to op­er­ate at pres­sures of up to 700 bar and tem­per­at­ures up to 150°C, and with a stand­ard flow range of 0.01 to 4.0 litres/min on 30Cstk oil, the OG1 or OG2 mod­els can routinely achieve out­stand­ing ac­cur­acy (0.75%) and re­peat­ab­il­ity (0.1%). 

Op­tim­um ac­cur­acy for bio­fuel pro­duc­tion

Ti­tan’s Oval Gear (OG) flow meters are an in­trins­ic com­pon­ent with­in Green Fuels’ biod­ies­el plants con­vert­ing bio waste in­to sus­tain­able bio­fuels.  Green Fuels’ award-win­ning re­search and pi­on­eer­ing pro­cess plants have powered build­ings with sus­tain­able fuel from used cook­ing oil, with on­go­ing de­vel­op­ment to con­vert fish oil and sewage sludge in­to bio­fuel. Simple, ac­cur­ate and chem­ic­ally res­ist­ant, Ti­tan’s OG flow meters, with the ad­di­tion of the Namur switch, have proved the ideal solu­tion for pre­cise chem­ic­al dos­ing for Green Fuels’ bio­fuel plants with­in a po­ten­tially haz­ard­ous en­vir­on­ment.
 
Ad­apt­ive flow meas­ure­ment designs for pet­ro­chem­ic­al ap­plic­a­tions 

Ti­tan En­ter­prises of­fer spe­cial op­tions and ad­apt­ive designs of its Oval Gear (OG) flow sensors to meet spe­cif­ic high-pres­sure re­quire­ments, aid chem­ic­al com­pat­ib­il­ity, and en­sure safe op­er­a­tion in po­ten­tially ex­plos­ive at­mo­spheres. Ti­tan’s Oval Gear range in­clude ATEX com­pli­ant IP65/NEMA 4 pro­tec­tion mod­els, and devices that of­fer in­trins­ic­ally safe op­tions for pro­cesses that op­er­ate with­in harsh en­vir­on­ment­al con­di­tions, such as ex­plos­ive or cor­ros­ive at­mo­spheres, where flow­met­ers are re­quired to with­stand tough en­vir­on­ments whilst main­tain­ing ac­cur­ate and re­li­able meas­ure­ment.

The pivotal role of oval gear flow meters lies in con­trolling pre­cise li­quid dosage for ef­fi­cient and eco­nom­ic­al pro­cess op­er­a­tions. With­in the pet­ro­chem­ic­al sec­tor, a chem­ic­al in­jec­tion sys­tem em­ploys ac­cur­ate low-flow meas­ur­ing sensors to in­ject a pre­ci­sion dosage of chem­ic­als re­quired, in­clud­ing an­ti­foam­ing scale in­hib­it­ors and meth­an­ol, in­to oil wells. Ac­cur­ate chem­ic­al dos­ing is es­sen­tial for the op­tim­al func­tion­ing of the well sys­tem, pro­mot­ing ef­fi­ciency and heightened pro­ductiv­ity without ex­cess­ive costs. OG flow­met­ers are crit­ic­al in pre­vent­ing over­dos­ing that can lead to un­ne­ces­sary ex­penses, or un­der-dos­ing that may trig­ger pre­ma­ture main­ten­ance and sub­op­tim­al well per­form­ance. 

For meas­ur­ing high vis­cos­ity li­quids like thick oils, bitu­men and tar, pre­ci­sion-en­gin­eered flow meters are ne­ces­sary. Ti­tan's stand­ard OG flow­met­ers are de­signed to provide highly ac­cur­ate flow meas­ure­ment up to 1000 cSt. For vis­cos­it­ies above 1000 cSt, Ti­tan provides High Vis­cos­ity OG op­tions spe­cially de­signed with pro­filed gears to fa­cil­it­ate ad­di­tion­al flow of the li­quid and pre­vent hy­draul­ic lock.

Con­di­tion mon­it­or­ing sensors are an es­sen­tial com­pon­ent in many of todays’ man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems and thanks to the rap­id ex­pan­sion and ap­plic­a­tion of di­git­al tech­no­lo­gies, their com­plex­ity and soph­ist­ic­a­tion con­tin­ues to be de­veloped and im­proved. Sen­son­ics ac­cel­er­o­met­ers are com­monly used on cent­ri­fuges, es­pe­cially in ap­plic­a­tions where load im­bal­ance, high speeds, and large masses with sig­ni­fic­ant kin­et­ic en­ergy can pose risks to both op­er­at­ors and equip­ment. 

Load im­bal­ance de­tec­tion

Cent­ri­fuges typ­ic­ally op­er­ate by rap­idly spin­ning loads and any im­bal­ance in the dis­tri­bu­tion of mass can lead to un­wanted un­even forces and po­ten­tially dam­aging vi­bra­tions. Ac­cel­er­o­met­ers are an ef­fect­ive way of mon­it­or­ing these vi­bra­tions and im­bal­ances.

High-speed mon­it­or­ing

Ac­cel­er­o­met­ers are also ex­tremely ef­fect­ive in mon­it­or­ing the high-speed ro­ta­tions of the cent­ri­fuge ro­tor, as ex­cess­ive speeds can amp­li­fy the ef­fects of im­bal­ances whilst help­ing to en­sure that the equip­ment op­er­ates with­in safe speed lim­its. If an im­bal­ance is iden­ti­fied, cor­rect­ive ac­tions can be taken to re­dis­trib­ute the load, ad­just the sample dis­tri­bu­tion, or per­form main­ten­ance to avoid ex­cess­ive vi­bra­tions that could lead to equip­ment dam­age or fail­ure.

Cata­stroph­ic fail­ure pre­ven­tion

Cent­ri­fuges, es­pe­cially those deal­ing with large masses at high speeds carry a sig­ni­fic­ant amount of kin­et­ic en­ergy and their cata­stroph­ic fail­ure can res­ult in the re­lease of this en­ergy, pos­ing a severe danger to life, equip­ment and prop­erty.

Used to con­tinu­ously mon­it­or vi­bra­tions and identi­fy any ab­nor­mal­it­ies that may in­clude cata­stroph­ic fail­ure ac­cel­er­o­met­ers there­fore al­low for im­me­di­ate shut­down pro­ced­ures and pre­vent­at­ive ac­tions to mit­ig­ate risks.

Sen­son­ics have un­par­alleled ex­pert­ise in un­der­stand­ing the per­form­ance cri­ter­ia for ac­cel­er­o­met­ers used across a wide range of fre­quen­cies. These piezo-elec­tric seis­mo­met­ers provide very high out­put of up to 50V/g, meas­ur­ing low fre­quen­cies down to 0.1Hz with an ul­tra-low noise floor. Their un­matched ex­per­i­ence in un­der­stand­ing and ap­ply­ing piezo-elec­tric seis­mo­met­er tech­no­logy un­der­pins the suc­cess of Sen­son­ics range of su­per­i­or noise per­form­ance PZS In­dus­tri­al Ac­cel­er­o­met­ers, which are ideal for in­dus­tri­al ma­chine con­di­tion mon­it­or­ing ap­plic­a­tions.

The PZS range of low-noise ac­cel­er­o­met­ers are an im­port­ant part of the Sen­son­ics range of trans­ducers that also in­cludes ve­lo­city vi­bra­tion sensors, eddy cur­rent prox­im­ity probes, ca­pa­cit­ive air gap sensors and a wide range of LVDT dis­place­ment trans­ducers. This ex­tens­ive range means there is a solu­tion for most vi­bra­tion, po­s­i­tion and shaft speed meas­ure­ment ap­plic­a­tions, such as mon­it­or­ing pumps, fans, mo­tors, cent­ri­fuges, gear­boxes, com­pressors and pro­cess equip­ment.
 

For its ed­dyN­CDT series of non-con­tact in­duct­ive dis­place­ment sensors Mi­cro-Ep­si­lon has in­tro­duced a new va­cu­um feed­through. The new eddy/fB0/fB0/tri­ax feed­through al­lows the sensors to be used in closed cham­bers for va­cu­um op­er­a­tion, as well as provid­ing a suit­able con­duit as a wall duct for place­ment of the sensor in­side a ves­sel. A plug­gable ver­sion is avail­able for all com­mon ed­dyN­CDT sensors.

Non-con­tact, in­duct­ive dis­place­ment sensors from Mi­cro-Ep­si­lon work on the basis of the eddy cur­rent meas­ure­ment prin­ciple. Un­like con­ven­tion­al in­duct­ive dis­place­ment sensors, ed­dyN­CDT sensors meas­ure on fer­ro­mag­net­ic and non-fer­ro­mag­net­ic ma­ter­i­als and of­fer high ac­cur­acy, fre­quency re­sponse and tem­per­at­ure sta­bil­ity. The sensors are in­sens­it­ive to oil, dirt, pres­sure and tem­per­at­ure. This makes them ideal for in­teg­ra­tion in­to ma­chines and OEM sys­tem ap­plic­a­tions.

Power­ful con­trol­lers

The power­ful ed­dyN­CDT 3060/3070 in­duct­ive meas­ure­ment sys­tems from Mi­cro-Ep­si­lon are ideal for fast and ac­cur­ate dis­place­ment meas­ure­ments. These sys­tems are equipped with a com­pact con­trol­ler, sensor and in­teg­rated cable. They are fact­ory cal­ib­rated for either fer­ro­mag­net­ic or non-fer­ro­mag­net­ic ma­ter­i­als, or both. The sys­tems are suit­able for meas­ur­ing high pre­ci­sion dis­place­ment, dis­tance, po­s­i­tion, run­out, elong­a­tion, thermal ex­pan­sion and oil film thick­ness in harsh in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ments. The sys­tem is de­signed to work with the sub-mini­ature range of ed­dyN­CDT sensors, which of­fer meas­ure­ment ranges from 0.4 mm to 8 mm and meas­ure to sub-mi­cron ac­cur­acy with a fre­quency re­sponse up to 20kHz.

The ed­dyN­CDT 3060/3070 meas­ur­ing sys­tems are dust-proof and pro­tec­ted against short-term im­mer­sion in wa­ter (IP67). The sensors are de­signed for an am­bi­ent tem­per­at­ure of up to +180 °C and an am­bi­ent pres­sure of up to 700 bar. Act­ive tem­per­at­ure com­pens­a­tion is provided for the sensor and con­trol­ler. This en­sures high tem­per­at­ure sta­bil­ity of the en­tire meas­ure­ment sys­tem.

For a wide field of ap­plic­a­tions

Mod­ern field­bus con­nectiv­ity is provided by the in­dus­tri­al grade M12 Eth­er­net in­ter­face. The com­pact die-cast alu­mini­um design and field­bus con­nectiv­ity en­able the en­coder to be in­teg­rated in­to a wide range of pro­duc­tion equip­ment, ma­chinery and sys­tems. An easy-to-use web in­ter­face sim­pli­fies setup and con­fig­ur­a­tion.

The DT3061/3071 con­trol­lers of­fer ad­vanced fea­tures such as five-point cal­ib­ra­tion, set­ting of switch­ing and tem­per­at­ure out­puts, and stor­age of mul­tiple char­ac­ter­ist­ics. When two or more sys­tems are used in par­al­lel, there is no need to syn­chron­ise them. A new fre­quency sep­ar­a­tion fea­ture al­lows the sys­tems to op­er­ate in par­al­lel without af­fect­ing each oth­er. Typ­ic­al ap­plic­a­tions in­clude the meas­ure­ment of shaft move­ment (lat­er­al and axi­al run­out), lub­ric­a­tion gap (oil film thick­ness), thermal ex­pan­sion and ma­chine mon­it­or­ing in high-speed auto­mated pro­duc­tion en­vir­on­ments. The sys­tem is also ideal for test bench, R&D and labor­at­ory ap­plic­a­tions due to the con­trol­ler's abil­ity to store mul­tiple char­ac­ter­ist­ics.
 

ATAM presents its new solen­oid valve cable con­nect­ors, with ATEX (EU Dir­ect­ive) and IECEx (in­ter­na­tion­al) cer­ti­fic­a­tion, de­veloped for fixed or mo­bile ap­plic­a­tions in haz­ard­ous areas. With the sup­port of ex­perts from the ATEX world, ATAM has self-cer­ti­fied its Form A (18 mm) and Form B (11 mm) con­nect­ors for use in 3G (gas/va­pours) and 3D (powder/dust) cat­egory equip­ment ac­cord­ing to the ATEX clas­si­fic­a­tion, thus en­sur­ing a suit­able level of pro­tec­tion in Zone 2 and Zone 22.

ATAM’s new ATEX-cer­ti­fied con­nect­ors stem from re­quests by its cus­tom­er base, that already uses the com­pany’s ATEX-cer­ti­fied coils, to also pro­duce con­nect­ors, thus guar­an­tee­ing the all-round com­pat­ib­il­ity and, there­fore, safety of the ap­plic­a­tion. The con­nect­ors can also be used with coils not ne­ces­sar­ily pro­duced by ATAM.

Ver­sat­ile kits with ac­cessor­ies 

To meet an­oth­er mar­ket re­quire­ment, namely max­im­um ver­sat­il­ity, the con­nect­ors are sup­plied both in kits with stand­ard DIN con­nec­tions and dis­as­sembled, to­geth­er with a whole range of ac­cessor­ies such as gas­kets, cable clamps, and cables in dif­fer­ent shapes and formats. For ex­ample, the cable clamp comes in two ver­sions that en­sure max­im­um ver­sat­il­ity for the dia­met­er of cables that can be clamped while the gas­kets come in both flat and lip ver­sions. In short, this is a com­pre­hens­ive kit de­signed to cov­er the most wide­spread ap­plic­a­tions in the mar­ket with a single product.

Joint com­pon­ent de­vel­op­ment for op­tim­ized re­li­ab­il­ity

With the in­tro­duc­tion of Form A and Form B cable con­nect­ors, ATAM now ex­pands its op­er­at­ing scope to po­ten­tially ex­plos­ive en­vir­on­ments with products - con­nect­or + coil - that be­ne­fit from joint de­vel­op­ment, while also re­ly­ing on a state-of-the-art test labor­at­ory. This al­lows the com­pany to sim­u­late the com­bined use of the two products and to veri­fy the seal­ing strength of the com­pon­ents even un­der ex­treme re­quire­ments. The res­ult is an ex­cel­lent solu­tion in terms of re­li­ab­il­ity, qual­ity and af­ford­ab­il­ity.

By per­form­ing nu­mer­ous tests the con­nect­or kits are all sup­plied with de­tailed in­struc­tions for quick and ac­cur­ate in­stall­a­tions in com­pli­ance with the strin­gent reg­u­la­tions.

With the GP21 and GS21 con­nect­ors, SCHURTER launched the world's first DC con­nect­or sys­tems stand­ard­ized ac­cord­ing to IEC TS 62735-1 for ef­fi­cient power dis­tri­bu­tion in data cen­ters, for power dis­tri­bu­tion strips and UPS ap­plic­a­tions back in 2019.

The GH21 and GI21 ap­pli­ance In­lets are now new products for the 400 VDC range. The GI21 mod­el is de­signed for pure DC op­er­a­tion, while the GH21 is a hy­brid ver­sion and can there­fore ac­cept both AC and DC cur­rent. SCHURTER also of­fers the re­wire­able GC21 Con­nect­or to match the ap­pli­ance In­lets. A cord re­ten­tion sys­tem de­veloped from scratch en­sures safe op­er­a­tion in every­day use. All three new products are made from a bio-based plastic (Green Plastic).

The ad­vant­ages of DC

With a pure DC sup­ply, cost-in­tens­ive and fail­ure-prone trans­form­a­tions and con­ver­sions, in­clud­ing their com­pon­ents, are com­pletely elim­in­ated. Op­er­a­tion­al re­li­ab­il­ity in­creases with im­proved ef­fi­ciency. And cli­mate-friendly tech­no­lo­gies that gen­er­ate dir­ect cur­rent are be­com­ing es­tab­lished in en­ergy gen­er­a­tion.

Due to its prop­er­ties, the stand­ards for dir­ect cur­rent (2.6 kW) re­quire a more com­plex con­nect­or con­nec­tion design as DC arcs must be avoided when dis­con­nect­ing the sup­ply. An­oth­er high­light is the ex­ten­ded tem­per­at­ure range of the con­nect­or pins from -5 °C to +105 °C.

Un­der the des­ig­na­tion SPC1, SCHURTER now also of­fers suit­able, cus­tom­ized DC power cables for all con­nec­tion op­tions on re­quest.
 

The Traco Elec­tron­ic THN 10UIR, TEN 30UIR and TEN 40UIR are rail­way ap­proved series of high-per­form­ance DC/DC con­vert­ers with ul­tra-wide 12:1 in­put voltage range and out­put power of 10, 30 and 40 Watts re­spect­ively. The com­pact, fully en­cap­su­lated con­vert­ers provide an in­creased res­ist­ance against shock/vi­bra­tion, and thermal shock. A high ef­fi­ciency of up to 90% give the con­vert­ers an ef­fect­ive tem­per­at­ure range of –40°C up to +70°C (with heat­sink up to 80°C) without de­rat­ing. Thanks to the ded­ic­ated hol­dup ca­pa­cit­or con­nec­tion, they meet ex­ten­ded hol­dup-time re­quire­ments without the need for bulky in­put ca­pa­cit­ors.

Qual­i­fic­a­tion for fire be­ha­viour ac­cord­ing to EN 45545-2

The ap­provals ac­cord­ing to stand­ards EN 50155 and EN 61373 qual­i­fy them for rail­way and trans­port­a­tion sys­tems. Ad­di­tion­al qual­i­fic­a­tion for the fire be­ha­viour of com­pon­ents ac­cord­ing to EN 45545-2 and the safety ap­prov­al ac­cord­ing to IEC/EN/UL 62368-1 sup­port a po­ten­tial com­pli­ance test of the ap­plic­a­tion. All mod­els of­fer an I/O-isol­a­tion voltage of 3’000 VDC and fea­ture an act­ive un­der voltage lock­out func­tion, re­mote on/off and ad­justable out­puts to en­sure that these con­vert­ers fit in any rug­ged­ized ap­plic­a­tions. 

Since the term bion­ics was coined in the late ‘50s, the tech­no­logy has tran­scen­ded sci­ence fic­tion to grow in­to a multi-bil­lion-dol­lar in­dustry. Com­bin­ing bio­logy and elec­tron­ics, a re­cent re­port projects that the bion­ic-pros­thet­ics mar­ket is set to grow from $1.5bn to $2.8bn by 2030, mean­ing an an­nu­al growth rate of over 9% (ht­tps://www.co­her­ent­mar­ket­in­sights.com/mar­ket-in­sight/bion­ic-pros­thet­ics-mar­ket-5815). Closely al­lied is a cor­res­pond­ing growth in end ef­fect­or tech­no­logy de­vel­op­ment, re­quired for the fi­nal ac­tu­ation of these ro­bot­ic solu­tions, in­clud­ing grip­ping and hold­ing.

Growth is be­ing driv­en by the need to en­hance the lives of those with dis­ab­il­it­ies, sup­por­ted by cap­ab­il­it­ies of new tech­no­logy that are en­abling a more ef­fect­ive use of ro­bot­ics. Bion­ic solu­tions in­clude pros­thet­ic limbs, provid­ing re­place­ments for hands, wrists, el­bows, or knees. Elec­tric­ally powered pros­thet­ic limbs are driv­en by small, DC mo­tors, and can be con­trolled by either a my­o­elec­tric­al sig­nal that uses im­pulses from the re­sid­ual limb, or a mi­cro­pro­cessor that col­lects po­s­i­tion and ac­cel­er­a­tion data from sensors to de­term­ine prop­er mo­tion. Al­tern­at­ively, elec­tric­ally powered exo­skel­et­ons are wear­able devices that provide ex­tern­al sup­port to the body, and typ­ic­ally in­volve the limbs.

Mini­ature mo­tors in bion­ics ap­plic­a­tions

For the pa­tient, the pros­thet­ic limb or exo­skel­et­on has to feel nat­ur­al, so they must be low-weight. While bion­ic de­vel­op­ment in­volves light yet strong ma­ter­i­als, such as car­bon fibre and graphene, the mo­tion sys­tems that drive them must achieve high power dens­ity.

For smal­ler body parts, in­clud­ing fin­gers and el­bow joints, co­re­less brushed DC mo­tors are used be­cause of their small size and weight. Here, the co­re­less fea­ture op­tim­ises low mass thanks to a design that re­moves the tra­di­tion­al iron core. For lar­ger joints, such as hips, knees, or shoulders, brush­less DC (BLDC) mo­tors are used to sup­port the in­creased torque re­quire­ment. Op­tim­ising power dens­ity is cru­cial to main­tain low weight, so mo­tor designs like Portes­cap’s Ul­tra EC™ brush­less DC mo­tor, which fea­tures a coil design that in­creases the torque-to-mass ra­tio, is highly be­ne­fi­cial.

For the wear­er of pros­thet­ics or exo­skel­et­ons to ex­per­i­ence in­tu­it­ive op­er­a­tion, the devices must also provide ac­tu­ation and con­trol akin to hu­man re­ac­tions, so mo­tion has to be dy­nam­ic yet smooth. Low in­er­tia, achieved through designs such as the co­re­less ro­tor, en­ables rap­id changes in speed, and this must be com­bined with low cog­ging, giv­ing smooth torque de­liv­ery. When brush­less tech­no­logy is re­quired for high­er torque, the Ul­tra EC mo­tor fea­tures a slot­less design, which also min­im­ises cog­ging and en­ables a con­sist­ent mag­net­ic field, re­du­cing vari­ations in torque.

Sig­ni­fic­ant for wear­er com­fort, bion­ic devices are bat­tery-de­pend­ent. To ex­tend bat­tery life, and min­im­ise the size and weight of the bat­tery, high mo­tor ef­fi­ciency is es­sen­tial. For smal­ler joints, the co­re­less brushed DC design min­im­ises en­ergy dis­sip­a­tion by re­du­cing the ef­fect of eddy cur­rent losses. For lar­ger ap­plic­a­tions, brush­less mo­tors are in­her­ently ef­fi­cient by re­mov­ing mech­an­ic­al com­mut­a­tion, but Portes­cap’s pro­pri­et­ary U coil design ex­tends ef­fi­ciency for its Ul­tra EC mo­tor.

Sur­gic­al ro­bots and mo­tion re­quire­ments

Im­prov­ing the health out­come of mil­lions of pa­tients world­wide, the re­quire­ment for sur­gic­al ro­bots is even more wide­spread than the bur­geon­ing bion­ics sec­tor. Since the first ro­bot-as­sisted sur­gery in 1985, today’s $4.4bn sur­gic­al ro­bot mar­ket is pro­jec­ted to grow at 18% up to 2030 as cap­ab­il­it­ies are en­hanced by trends in­clud­ing AI.

A key ad­vant­age of ro­bot­ic sur­gery is ex­treme pre­ci­sion. This en­ables in­tric­ate pro­ced­ures to be car­ried out with min­im­ally in­vas­ive sur­gery, help­ing the pa­tient to re­cov­er much faster. Like bion­ics, the mo­tion sys­tems that power sur­gic­al ro­bots are fun­da­ment­al to reach high-level pre­ci­sion.

Portes­cap has ex­tens­ive ex­per­i­ence in mo­tion con­trol to sup­port com­plex ap­plic­a­tions and is now ex­pand­ing its cap­ab­il­it­ies to solve prob­lems with frame­less solu­tions. Frame­less mo­tors con­sist of un-housed ro­tors and stators and, some of the be­ne­fits ad­dressed with this tech­no­logy in­clude:

• Op­tim­isa­tion of en­vel­ope (size, weight re­duc­tion) for the spe­cif­ic ap­plic­a­tion 
• Ex­cel­lent torque dens­ity and ease of in­teg­ra­tion with strain wave gear­ing 
• Min­im­ising back­lash for pre­cise po­s­i­tion­ing and hold­ing 
• Min­im­ising cog­ging for smooth mo­tion

Al­though mo­tion sys­tems for bion­ics need to be dur­able for every­day use, those used in ro­bot­ic sur­gery take this up a level be­cause of the need, in most cases, to with­stand ster­il­isa­tion. Portes­cap’s Sur­gic­al Mo­tion Solu­tions fea­tures many auto­clavable mi­cro mo­tion solu­tions, with its brush­less slot­ted mo­tors able to sur­vive up to 1,000 auto­clave cycles.

End ef­fect­or con­trol

Ac­tu­ation and con­trol of the ro­bot­ic end ef­fect­ors for sur­gic­al ro­bots, such as the high pre­ci­sion blades or grinders, are also in­flu­enced by trends from wider in­dustry. No mat­ter where or how a ro­bot is ap­plied, its end ef­fect­ors are es­sen­tial to pick up or grip an ob­ject, hold a tool, or push/pull an ob­ject. Com­monly, end ef­fect­ors are based on grip­pers with either par­al­lel jaws or three fin­gers, plus an­gu­lar mo­tion grip­pers.

De­vel­op­ments over the next dec­ade will see the in­teg­ra­tion of ma­chine vis­ion with AI, en­abling grip­pers to identi­fy and ma­nip­u­late ob­jects with even great­er ac­cur­acy, al­low­ing them to per­form mul­tiple tasks sim­ul­tan­eously. To achieve these ad­vances, elec­tric grip­per con­trol, rather than pneu­mat­ic, is the norm, thanks to the high­er de­gree of con­trol and power dens­ity provided.

De­mand on mo­tion sys­tems that ac­cen­tu­ate these ad­vant­ages will con­tin­ue. This will in­clude the in­creas­ing need for pre­cise po­s­i­tion and force con­trol. Dy­nam­ic mo­tors that can rap­idly ac­cel­er­ate will help achieve this, with slot­less BLDC mo­tors provid­ing the low in­er­tia, low weight, and high torque char­ac­ter­ist­ics ne­ces­sary. Mo­tors will also be equipped with ad­vanced feed­back devices, such as high-res­ol­u­tion en­coders, to en­able ac­cur­ate and re­spons­ive grip ad­just­ments.

Cus­tom­ised mo­tion de­vel­op­ment

Each sec­tor has an ar­ray of ro­bot­ic ap­plic­a­tion pos­sib­il­it­ies, and the re­quire­ments for every in­di­vidu­al use case var­ies greatly. Sub­sequently, this places a wide span of de­mands on mo­tion sys­tems. To achieve the most ef­fect­ive mo­tion spe­cific­a­tion, a grow­ing trend will be the re­quire­ment for cus­tom­isa­tion. One mo­tor design can’t serve all needs, so cus­tom­isa­tion will be in­creas­ingly re­quired for vir­tu­ally every type of ro­bot.

This ap­proach will be cru­cial to op­tim­ise ro­bot­ic per­form­ance to spe­cif­ic tasks, and hence im­prove the pa­tient or wear­er out­come. Cus­tom­isa­tion can also stream­line in­teg­ra­tion for the ro­bot build­er, and the time sav­ing will not only en­able a faster time to mar­ket, but it can also achieve a more eco­nom­ic­al cost of de­vel­op­ment. 

The se­lec­tion of an op­tim­um mo­tion con­trol part­ner must con­sider its cap­ab­il­ity to op­tim­ise per­form­ance in com­pact en­vel­opes and the ca­pa­city to sup­port de­mand­ing de­vel­op­ment sched­ules.
 

Nex­en’s Nex­Safe ser­vo­mo­tor brakes of­fer bi­d­irec­tion­al brak­ing cap­ab­il­it­ies and are In­dustry 4.0 com­pat­ible. The full line of Nex­Safe ser­vo­mo­tor brakes is Func­tion­al Safety cer­ti­fied to com­ply with the in­ter­na­tion­al safety stand­ard ISO 13849-1. Cat­egory Level up to 4 and Per­form­ance Level up to e can be achieved us­ing Nex­safe products in re­com­men­ded con­fig­ur­a­tion. 

Nex­Safe ser­vo­mo­tor brakes have mul­tiple en­gage­ment springs and an in­teg­rated clamp col­lar with backup key­ways. Up to three op­er­at­ing mode sensors for feed­back en­sure con­fid­ent, safe emer­gency stop­ping, hold­ing and po­s­i­tion­ing. The sensors provide feed­back and in­form­a­tion to max­im­ize ma­chine ef­fi­ciency and aid with mo­tor and drive pro­gram­ming, pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance, and op­er­a­tion­al feed­back. 
 

ABB's MV Ti­tani­um concept in­trodudes a me­di­um voltage (MV) vari­able speed in­dus­tri­al mo­tor in the 1 to 5 mega­watt (MW) range that com­bines con­nectiv­ity and con­trol fea­tures in an easy to spe­cify and in­stall pack­age. The all-in-one concept brings the be­ne­fits of en­ergy ef­fi­ciency to MV mo­tor-driv­en pro­cesses, which today ac­count for 10% of the world's elec­tri­city. 

“En­ergy ef­fi­ciency meas­ures of speed-con­trolled mo­tors have gained sig­ni­fic­ant trac­tion in small size mo­tors, for low voltage ap­plic­a­tions. But large mo­tors have so far been left be­hind, due to ini­tial cost and com­plex­ity, with only 10-15 per­cent cur­rently con­nec­ted to a drive,” says Heikki Vepsäläinen, Pres­id­ent of ABB Large Mo­tors and Gen­er­at­ors. “But that is set to change with our new MV Ti­tani­um concept that makes it cost-ef­fect­ive and straight­for­ward to in­stall a suit­able matched mo­tor, with in­creased con­trol, mon­it­or­ing, and con­nectiv­ity in a single pack­age. It is the right up­grade solu­tion for ex­ist­ing dir­ect-on-line mo­tors. And the po­ten­tial sav­ings in en­ergy costs and CO₂ emis­sions are huge – if we ret­ro­fit­ted the en­tire in­stalled base, it would be like tak­ing just over 1000 coal-fired power sta­tions off­line.” 

Com­pact foot­print for in­teg­ra­tion in ex­ist­ing in­stall­a­tions

In this pur­suit, ABB has de­veloped the MV Ti­tani­um concept to ad­dress the main per­ceived obstacles re­lated to in­stalling a drive with a large mo­tor. These in­clude not only the ini­tial cost of a sep­ar­ate drive, but also its as­so­ci­ated elec­tric­al house (e-house), trans­formers, switchgear and cabling that mul­tiply the cap­it­al cost and in­crease the com­plex­ity of in­stall­a­tion, es­pe­cially on ex­ist­ing sites where space is at a premi­um. In ad­di­tion to these sav­ings, it will also provide OPEX sav­ings due to the en­ergy ef­fi­ciency it will provide.

The next-gen­er­a­tion concept has been built on ABB’s 140 years of mo­tor design and 50 years of drives tech­no­logy ex­per­i­ence to cre­ate a solu­tion that in­teg­rates en­ergy ef­fi­ciency, con­trol­lab­il­ity, and con­nectiv­ity in­to a single pack­age. Fur­ther­more, it has in­tel­li­gence built in, with ana­lyt­ic­al and con­nectiv­ity cap­ab­il­it­ies so it can seam­lessly in­teg­rate in­to ex­ist­ing sys­tems, as well as provid­ing soft­ware lib­rar­ies and in­ter­faces for pro­cess mon­it­or­ing and op­tim­iz­a­tion.

The MV Ti­tani­um mo­tors are in­ten­ded for use with pumps, com­pressors, and fans as typ­ic­al ap­plic­a­tions, where they could re­duce en­ergy con­sump­tion by up to 40 per­cent as well as en­han­cing pro­ductiv­ity and min­im­iz­ing down­time. They will be used across a wide range of sec­tors in­clud­ing power and re­new­ables, pro­cessing, min­ing, ce­ment, and wa­ter. Heikki Vepsäläinen con­cludes: “Bey­ond its tech­nic­al pro­gress, this next-gen­er­a­tion mo­tor concept rep­res­ents a sig­ni­fic­ant step to­wards pro­ductiv­ity in a low car­bon world. It puts ABB well on the road to sup­port chan­ging large, fixed speed mo­tors to fully elec­tric­ally con­trolled mo­tors, one by one.” 

Flender an­nounces the glob­al launch of the next ex­ten­sion of Flender One. The single stage gear­boxes are now avail­able as ver­sat­ile solu­tions for over one hun­dred dif­fer­ent ap­plic­a­tions. The new gear units cov­er a wide range of ap­plic­a­tion needs, in­clud­ing buck­et el­ev­at­ors, belt con­vey­ors, and hoist­ing ap­plic­a­tions. With a broad spec­trum of power classes, sizes, and designs, these gear units en­sure op­tim­al cov­er­age of vari­ous in­dus­tri­al re­quire­ments.

They stand out as tailored solu­tions and cus­tom­ers only pur­chase what they need, elim­in­at­ing un­ne­ces­sary com­pon­ents and max­im­iz­ing ef­fi­ciency. This cus­tom­iz­a­tion re­duces op­er­at­ing ex­penses and en­hances per­form­ance, provid­ing a per­fect fit for each spe­cif­ic ap­plic­a­tion. Ad­di­tion­ally, the gear­boxes of­fer a wide range of add-on parts and cus­tom­iz­able out­put shafts.

Easy Con­fig­ur­a­tion

The Flender One design saves both time and money in plan­ning and plant op­er­a­tions. The new con­fig­ur­a­tion pro­cess can be com­pleted in minutes with just three para­met­ers. Com­bined with in­stantly ac­cess­ible 3-D data, prompt quo­ta­tions, and short­er de­liv­ery times due to auto­mated man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cesses, project timelines are ac­cel­er­ated from the plan­ning phase. Over­all, plant op­er­at­ors can achieve up to 25 per­cent time sav­ings in plan­ning through sim­pli­fied pro­cesses. In op­er­a­tion, the Flender One plat­form re­duces op­er­at­ing ex­penses. All gear­boxes are equipped with per­form­ance-op­tim­ized Meta­per­form® gear­ing, re­du­cing power dis­sip­a­tion by up to 20 per­cent com­pared to pre­vi­ous mod­els and a 30 per­cent high­er thermal ca­pa­city. Also, the bear­ing life­time in­creases by 80 per­cent. This res­ults in faster cost amort­iz­a­tion for in­dus­tri­al gear­boxes.

Smart gear­boxes with AIQ tech­no­logy 

The solu­tion of­fers built-in gear unit in­tel­li­gence straight from the fact­ory. Each unit comes with an in­teg­rated AIQ Core sensor, provid­ing di­git­al mon­it­or­ing and in­tel­li­gent on­board ana­lyt­ic­al func­tions. This al­lows for in­creased plant avail­ab­il­ity and pro­cess op­tim­iz­a­tion, re­du­cing un­planned down­time by up to 70 per­cent. Data- and need-based main­ten­ance in­ter­vals can de­crease ser­vice costs by up to 40 per­cent and ser­vice-re­lated down­time by up to 50 per­cent. The op­tion­al torque meas­ure­ment func­tion al­lows for pro­cess and op­er­at­ing point op­tim­iz­a­tion. The AIQ Core torque can be eas­ily se­lec­ted via the con­fig­ur­at­or.

With the help of col­lec­ted data and AI mod­els, Flender is now able to size the gear­boxes only as large as needed for the re­spect­ive ap­plic­a­tion. Most in­dus­tri­al gear­boxes from all man­u­fac­tur­ers in the field, in­clud­ing Flender, are over­sized by up to 50 per­cent. Now with Flender One and AIQ, a tool is giv­en to con­tinu­ously elim­in­ate this over­siz­ing to­geth­er with cus­tom­ers and real­ize massive sav­ings in raw ma­ter­i­als, en­ergy con­sump­tion, de­liv­ery times and in­stall­a­tion space. 

A proven suc­cessor 

Flender One suc­ceeds the renowned stand­ard in­dus­tri­al gear­box range, FSG, with over 500,000 units in the field. As the most suc­cess­ful stand­ard in­dus­tri­al gear­box range to date, FSG sets a high bar, but Flender One is ready to sur­pass it with its in­nov­at­ive fea­tures and su­per­i­or per­form­ance.
 

The European stand­ards DIN EN 60034-30-1: 2014-12 (mains op­er­a­tion) and DIN VDE 0530-30-2: 2019-02 (fre­quency in­vert­er op­er­a­tion) define the four ef­fi­ciency classes for elec­tric mo­tors from IE1 to IE4+. Based on the un­der­ly­ing cri­ter­ia, even more ef­fi­cient drives are known as IE5 with­in in­dustry. The IE5+ per­man­ent mag­net syn­chron­ous mo­tor from NORD sig­ni­fic­antly ex­ceeds the highest ef­fi­ciency class IE5. The es­pe­cially com­pact and en­ergy-ef­fi­cient mo­tor of­fers a con­stant high ef­fi­ciency of up to 93 per­cent and more over a wide torque range and thus also de­vel­ops op­tim­al en­ergy per­form­ance in par­tial load and par­tial speed ranges. 

Sig­ni­fic­antly lower CO₂ emis­sions than IE3

This means that the IE5+ mo­tor not only saves en­ergy, but also emis­sions. In com­par­is­on to a con­ven­tion­al IE3 asyn­chron­ous mo­tor, an IE5+ syn­chron­ous mo­tor re­duces emis­sions by around 0.15 t CO2 per year. This ap­plies to one single mo­tor. In large sys­tems, for ex­ample in in­t­ra­lo­gist­ics with hun­dreds or even thou­sands of drives, this adds up to an im­press­ive total sav­ing. This mod­el cal­cu­la­tion is based on the fol­low­ing as­sump­tions: 
•    IE3 asyn­chron­ous mo­tor with 0.75 kW, 83% mo­tor ef­fi­ciency and hel­ic­al bevel gear unit,
•    IE5+ syn­chron­ous mo­tor with 0.75 kW, 93% mo­tor ef­fi­ciency and hel­ic­al bevel gear unit,
•    Peri­od: 16 op­er­at­ing hours per day, which cor­res­ponds to 4,000 op­er­at­ing hours per year,
•    En­ergy sav­ings of the IE5+: around 400 kWh per year,
•    Re­duc­tion of emis­sions: 0.15 t CO₂ per year (with a CO₂ emis­sions factor of 366 g/kWh).

Sav­ings not only in en­ergy – also in ma­ter­i­al

The IE5+ mo­tor from NORD can also im­press with an­oth­er sus­tain­ab­il­ity factor: ma­ter­i­al ef­fi­ciency. “Vari­ous in­nov­a­tions in the mo­tor design help us to real­ise sig­ni­fic­ant ma­ter­i­al sav­ings with our new IE5+ series”, Jörg Ni­er­mann, Head of Mar­ket­ing at NORD, em­phas­ises. NORD DRIVESYS­TEMS de­signed the IE5+ as an 8-pole syn­chron­ous mo­tor in an IPM design. This re­duces the size of the mo­tor’s act­ive com­pon­ents, which not only res­ults in ma­ter­i­al sav­ings in the sheet met­al pack­age but also in the mag­net ma­ter­i­al.

Less rare earth ele­ments

In the course of ma­ter­i­al sav­ings, it was also pos­sible to re­duce the pro­por­tion of rare earth ele­ments in the mag­net ma­ter­i­al. Rare earth ele­ments are mainly found in Rus­sia, China and Brazil and can only be mined with great en­vir­on­ment­al im­pact. “We are glad that we were able to sig­ni­fic­antly re­duce the use of this ma­ter­i­al”, Ni­er­mann ex­plains. 

With 8-pole syn­chron­ous mo­tors, the stator can also be man­u­fac­tured with the so-called single-tooth wind­ings. As a res­ult, valu­able ma­ter­i­al such as cop­per is only used where it is ac­tu­ally pro­duct­ive, and in­ef­fi­cient use in the wind­ing head is re­duced.

“Our IE5+ syn­chron­ous mo­tor com­bines en­ergy ef­fi­ciency with ma­ter­i­al ef­fi­ciency and thus scores twice in terms of sus­tain­ab­il­ity”, Ni­er­mann high­lights. Of course, this not only ap­plies to the IE5+ mo­tor it­self but also to the DuoDrive geared mo­tor, in which the IE5+ is in­teg­rated.