Technologies In Motion

Wireless Reference Architectures In the Works

Engineers wanting to deploy wireless networks on the factory floor will soon get a helping hand from Rockwell Automation and Cisco Systems.

At the Rockwell Automation Fair in Nashville this week, the two companies announced that they will release reference architectures for wireless industrial Ethernet. According to Steve Ludwig, commercial programs manager for Rockwell’s Automation Control and Information Group, the new reference architectures will consist of detailed application design guidelines, best implementation practices and information on how to integrate wired and wireless networks.

Rockwell and Cisco, which last year teamed up to develop industrial Ethernet technologies, have already come out with Ethernet To The Factory reference architectures for wired networks, “You see a lot of reference architectures in the world electronics design,” says Ludwig. “But in the past there hasn’t been anything like this for manufacturing.”

Scheduled for release in 2009, the new “Wireless To the Factory Floor” reference architectures won’t come a moment too soon. As Ludwig points out, the wireless technology available for industrial automation is changing rapidly. For example, Rockwell and Cisco are currently testing the Wireless-N (IEEE 802.11n) technology to confirm that it offers the performance needed for key industrial networking tasks such as providing real-time communication between controllers and I/O.

Motion Network Gets Its Own Packaging Profile

Makers of packaging machines will soon have an easier time implementing real-time Ethernet control, especially when they use drives, controls and i/o from different vendors.

Here at the Pack Expo Show in Chicago, the SERCOS organization announced that it would develop Pack Profile for SERCOS III, its real-time, Ethernet-based motion control network.  According to Peter Lutz, managing director of SERCOS International, the profile consists of those SERCOS III functions commonly used in packaging machine applications. “The key is multi-vendor interoperability of servo controls, drives and i/o on packaging machines,” says Lutz, who explains that products that conform to the profile will provide plug-and-play functionality regardless of vendor.

This new Pack Profile represents just the latest packaging-specific profile for SERCOS. Back in 1995, the organization worked with OMAC’s Packaging Machine Workgroup to create a similar profile for SERCOS II, the non-Ethernet forerunner of its third generation network. And machine builders have over the years made good use of that initial profile. “We have more than two million SERCOS I and II nodes installed to date,” says Lutz, “And packaging is the biggest segment.”  That acceptance of SERCOS was in evidence at the show. To take one example, the show had about 90 different machines running on various Bosch Rexroth drives and controllers that communicate over various SERCOS networks.

With the new Pack Profile, packaging machine makers will be able to take better advantage of functionality associated with SERCOS III’s implementation of industrial Ethernet.  These include high speed data transfer of 100 MBits per second and cabling reduction. SERCOS III network topology also offers inherent redundancy and hot swapping of devices on the network.

Fluid Power Gets 'Em While They're Young

Forget about Hooked On Phonics. What today’s students really need is to get Hooked On Hydraulics.

At least, that’s the point of a new education initiative from the National Fluid Power Association (NFPA) and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Education Foundation. Last week, the two organizations announced they would team up to develop programs that teach fluid power concepts to middle- and high-school science students.

According to Eric Lanke, NFPA’s executive director, the fluid power curriculum will debut as early as Summer 2009, initially as part of the Gateway Academies run by the SME and Project Lead The Way. In the long term, the NFPA and SME plan to bring fluid power into other youth-based engineering programs as well as science classes during the school year. Lanke reports that the NFPA is also interested in summer camps that focus solely on promising fluid power applications–such as hydraulic hybrid vehicles.

So why all the effort to reach younger students? Lanke makes a case that fluid power knowledge amongst many working engineers isn’t what it should be, and he puts some of the blame on an engineering curriculum that gives hydraulics and pneumatics short shrift. “Engineering schools that teach fluid power at the early stage of the bachelor-level degree are the rare exceptions,” he says, noting that schools often require only “a chapter or two” in the third and fourth years.

Lanke hopes that an early introduction to hydraulics and pneumatics will make these technologies more attractive to science-minded students, especially at a time when many are being drawn to electronics and computers. “What we’re trying to do is get fluid power concepts on the radar screens of engineers before they even know they want to be engineers,” he says.