Platform for the food and beverage industry
After all, it should contribute to plant flexibility, efficiency, availability and connectivity. A secure field box can provide this.
A fieldbox is a simple and inexpensive installation solution for realizing highly flexible and individually configurable safety solutions for larger machines and plants and for transmitting diagnostic and status information. Schmersal, developer and manufacturer of high-quality switching components and systems for the safety of machines and plants has a Safety Fieldbox with PROFINET/PROFIsafe fieldbus interface in its product range.
A wide variety of safety switching components can be connected via the universal device interfaces with eight-pole M12 plugs. Think of electronic and electromechanical safety interlocks, sensors, control panels, light curtains and switches. In this way, numerous combinations are possible. This makes the Safety Fieldbox usable for typical safety concepts that are usually used in, for example, modular packaging plants consisting of several parts. For example, two or three safety switching components or safety interlocks can be connected via the Safety Fieldbox for position monitoring of a guard door or a maintenance valve, a safety light curtain for zone protection of an infeed zone and a control panel with emergency stop button can be connected to the higher-level safety control. By using the M12-Power plug as power supply for the Safety Fieldbox, up to ten Safety Fieldboxes - depending on the type of switching component and power consumption - can be easily connected in series with eighty devices.
The diagnostic signals of all connected safety switching components can be evaluated using the integrated digital input at each eight-pole terminal connection of the Safety Fieldbox. Since various status data can be collected, transferred and evaluated in this way, the transparency of the processes increases and a trouble-free operation of the machines is promoted. This information can be used, for example, to detect irregularities and intervene early in the event of a malfunction. The Safety Fieldbox thus becomes an important component for status monitoring and predictive (at the right time) maintenance (condition monitoring and predictive maintenance) of systems.
