Stainless steel control panels in perfect hygienic design

In addition to its standard control panels, B&R offers Automation Panels that meet requirements unique to specific industries. Especially in the beverage, food, pharmaceutical and packaging industries, Automation Panels must meet stringent requirements for hygiene, robustness and reliability. The special construction of these products from B&R ensures that they do just that.

B&R's stainless steel panels have a hygienic design and use particularly resistant materials, such as smooth stainless steel, a high-quality polyester overlay and special sealing materials. Automation panels can be combined with a PC, creating the Panel PC with the functions of a PLC and an HMI in a single unit. They thus go a long way toward bringing down hardware and software costs for machine builders. Because these PCs are no larger than the DVI Smart display Link receiver, it adds no additional physical depth to the system. By making the interfaces all accessible from one side, ease of use is assured. Image processing can be particularly powerful thanks to Core i technology in the Intel Atom processors. For the first time, direct support for DirectX 12 is also provided, offering even more opportunities for enhanced graphics capabilities in SCADA and other HMI systems. All resolutions and displays go up to 24" and support Full HD.

Intuitive touch screens

The stainless steel swivel arm panels are equipped with multi-touch or single-touch screens. These are easy and intuitive to use. Operating reliability is increased because only meaningful options are displayed on the screen. This minimizes the possibility of errors. The application determines which operating states are available for selection. This helps the user confidently navigate step-by-step through more complex procedures. The touch screens themselves have a smooth surface, so their integration into the control panel allows them to continue to meet strict hygiene requirements. Cables are installed through the swing arm system and then connected to an easily accessible area with IP65 protection. In this way, cheaper standard cables suffice. Customers opting for Smart Display Link 3 or 4, B&R's smart image transmission technology benefit from compact, cable-friendly RJ45 connectors, the perfect choice for routing cables through narrow spaces, such as in swing arms.

Excellent value for money

The innovative design of the Automation PC with its dual- and quadcore processor technology represents a new milestone for embedded systems, and it does so at excellent value for money. All variants operate without internal fans. The devices are equipped with all important interfaces, including 2 x Gigabit Ethernet and 2 x USB 3.0. Additional interface modules can be provided to take advantage of the benefits of POWERLINK and CAN. Data storage is on compact CFast cards.

Open and real-time

The Automation PC bridges the gap between open and real-time operating systems. Both Windows 10 IoT enterprise and Linux are available. The real-time operating system Automation Runtime transforms an industrial PC into a full-featured industrial controller capable of very high performance. The hypervisor combines Automation runtime and Windows and unifies the open PC world with applications that demand hard real-time. Based on the multi-core processor architecture, the real-time operating system runs on one core while the others are reserved for Windows.