Can I reduce my wiring costs? - You Con.du.it and we’ll show you how.
While not everyone may realize it, wiring can be a large expense when building equipment. The labor and time it takes to wire a panel, along with the materials involved may not seem very flexible. Here we’ll show you some methods to decrease your install time and reduce panel real estate for a higher profit and increased flexiblity on your systems.
A typical system requires three main elements, a control module, input/output terminals and valve driver relays. How these are all wired together can have a large impact on the total costs of your system.
The most common system consists of a junction box which contains the power supply, the controller and the input and output terminals and valve driver relays. With this method, all of the system components are contained in one space and neatly labeled. These junction boxes can be small, but often quickly grow in size. Once all of the input and output relays are placed inside of the panel box, all of the wiring to the actual machine stems out through the conduit. As panel size increases and system complexity grows, this can quickly become a large amount of wires to run and keep track of.
Standard Junction Box Mount I/O Block
The second method of wiring a system again starts at the junction box, which contains the controller and input/output terminals, but not the valve driver relays. In this instance, the valve driver relays are united into a single module called, more simply, a valve driver. The valve driver is mounted at the end of a valve manifold, and connects to the controller through a logic line. The valve driver takes information from the logic line, figures out which valve solenoid it applies to, and turns on that valve solenoid. This method makes the valve wiring significantly easier and greatly reduces the wiring time, as well as the total number of wires used. This also reduces the junction box size.
Ross D-Series Valve Driver and I/O block
The third method, and arguably the cleanest method, again holds the controller in the junction box, but in this case, neither the input/output terminals nor the valve driver relays are contained inside the main panel. In this instance, the input/output modules are connected to the valve driver/controller. The valve driver now, in addition to figuring out which valve solenoids to turn on, also interprets input/output data, and sends that back to the controller. These signals work through the same logic line that is used for the valve driver. This means that you won’t have to wire the input/outputs from the machine to the control module PLC. Instead, they can be wired directly where the machine is being used. This means your system may only need two wires – power and logic – going back to your controller. Additionally, the shorter wires will make a system easier to troubleshoot. Because the valve driver and input/output terminals are no longer in the junction box, it’s size can also be greatly reduced. For finding reduced costs, and creating a neater, easier to use system, you may find a valve driver to hold the most cost effective solution.
Extra Extra!
It is also possible to achieve further gains and cost reductions by using some newer communciation formats. Device-Net and Profi-bus are current common formats. These formats are still primarily PLC based. The greatest gains can be realized utilizing Ethernet (Modbus TCP). These systems allow a central computer to act as the controller for multiple systems at the same time.