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Automation Gets Scientific at Pack Expo
Beckhoff Automation has launched a new initiative aimed at seamlessly merging control and measurement tasks in real time
Joseph Ogando, Senior Editor -- Design News, November 12, 2008
Controls engineers may already think of their work as scientific, but Beckhoff Automation plans to make it even more so. The company has quietly been developing a concept it calls "Scientific Automation," which company President Graham Harris describes as a seamless real-time integration of control and measurement technologies.
"The key is to have an ultra-fast control and communications systems," he says, noting that Beckhoff's eXtreme Fast Control (XFC) technology can already achieve nanosecond precision in event marking through the combination of PC-based controllers, the EtherCAT real-time Ethernet network and TwinCAT control software.
Beckhoff is still working to flesh out the concept, but Harris envisions high-speed event marking and measurement of temperatures, vibration, positions and more. "How Scientific Automation will play out depends very much on what smart engineers choose to do with it. Right now, it's still early days," Harris says. Ultimately, though, the goal is to use the ultra-fast measurements of changing machine conditions to update control loops in real time. Harris says some of the measurement tasks that Beckhoff wants to bring into the real-time control system can currently be performed only by specialized off-line devices.
Early days or not, Scientific Automation is off to a good start. Harris says a few customers, which he wouldn't name owing to confidentiality agreements, have been using XFC for high-speed event marking and data collection. "They're already using XFC in ways that are consistent with Scientific Automation," he says.
The company has also started to release the first of its Scienfic Automation I/O products. Here at the Pack Expo Show in Chicago, it showed off the new EL3602 EtherCAT I/O terminal, which directly measures signals in an I/O system and could be used for a variety of analog data collection tasks on everything from test rigs to production machines. The two-channel EL3602 handles signals ranging between -10 and +10V and digitizes them with a 24-bit resolution. Beckhoff puts its accuracy at ±0.01 percent at 25°C.
Harris says Beckhoff will likely release more Scienfic Automation-capable products from Beckhoff after the SPS/Drives Show later this month. So stay tuned.
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