Posted to News on 30th May 2024, 12:00
Simplifying industrial machinery safety
Euchner will attend Drives and Controls 2024 at the NEC, Birmingham, from June 5-6, demonstrating how the company's products can improve safety in various industrial machinery applications and showing visitors the benefits of bringing safety devices into their fieldbus network.
On the stand, Euchner will showcase the MGB2 Multifunctional Gate Box - a guard locking device for functional safety over EtherCAT (FSoE) protocol. Equipment builders can mount it on both hinged and sliding doors, and it comes with a revised design and a modular layout to improve flexibility and cost-effectiveness. The MGB2 has a locking force of 2,000 N, preventing unintentional opening of the guard and helping operators comply with EN ISO 13849-1 and EN ISO 14119 machinery safety standards.
Operators can connect their MGB2 to EtherCAT P, and PROFINET/PROFIsafe via the bus module MBM. The MBM supplies the protocol frame with the necessary PROFIsafe input and output bytes, and users can quickly receive comprehensive diagnostics information in the form of messages.
At Drives and Controls, Euchner will be raising awareness of how its various technologies can run on a fieldbus. This can bring valuable savings, improve communication and benefit compliance by highlighting any malfunctions so that they can be addressed in advance.
Attendees can learn more about how to improve safety without complex cabling. Euchner's emergency stop devices, interlocks and other technology can all operate on the same daisy-chain network, reducing the amount of cabling required. In contrast, many existing safety engineering products require multiple cables that go back to the programmable logic controller (PLC), and multiple I/O cards to process the signals between the controllers.
"Over the years, the cost of fieldbus safety has fallen, but functional safety generally remains highly complex - and large amounts of cabling doesn't make things any easier," explained David Dearden, managing director of Euchner UK. "At Drives and Controls, we'll share advice on how to improve safety in a cost and time efficient way, without excessive cabling."
