SafetyNews from safety-related automation
With increasing cycle rates, machine functions are becoming ever more complex - against this background, the topic of functional safety is becoming increasingly important. Computer&AUTOMATION shows a selection of current products relating to this topic in a picture gallery.
The Schmersal Group has presented an Industry 4.0-compatible safety controller: the Protect PSC1 with integrated OPC UA server. The connection of the PSC1 to the industrial machine-to-machine communication protocol enables extensive information from Schmersal products to be included in a manufacturer-independent data exchange in the future. This includes status data of the safety outputs, safety-related characteristic values, information on the service life of the sensors, order information, data sheets, drawings and images. Safety sensors that have a Schmersal SD bus can also display information about the actuator, the temperature in the sensor, the serial number of the device and error messages (such as short circuit, overtemperature, internal device error, communication error, output Y1/Y2, etc.). Products can also use this solution to provide maintenance information so that components can be replaced in good time as part of predictive maintenance. The fieldbus protocols can be selected via software, so that the Protect PSC1 only requires one piece of hardware for different fieldbus systems. Schmersal has integrated an OPC UA server into this communication interface. This means that extensive data from all safety sensors in the Schmersal portfolio can be retrieved in machine-readable form with a semantic description via the M2M communication protocol.