Innovative Thinking

Most products that you come across in your day-to-day life have been certified to meet certain safety standards. A certification is documentation provided by a certifying organization to show that a product meets all the requirements of that specific organization. If you look at your phone charger or most other electronics, you will probably notice the markings of UL, CUL, or some other certifying organization saying that your specific product meets their requirements. Control panels also have their own subset of certification. 

Contactors and relays are switches that allow control of a system by opening and closing under power. There are two major components that make up these devices: a coil and contacts. When a small current is applied to the coil, it creates a magnetic field that pulls a contact into the opposite position. The contacts come as either normally open (NO) or normally closed (NC) and they allow different control states within a circuit. A normally open contact on a relay doesn’t allow current to flow in its natural, unactuated state; when power is applied to the coil, it then allows current to flow. A normally closed contact functions in the opposite way - it allows current to flow in its natural, unactuated state, and stops the flow of current when actuated. Contactors and relays can be purchased with many different configurations of contacts.

Recently, one of Premier Automation’s Senior Automation Engineers visited a customer in Ridgway, PA to assist them with their A2 robotic cell machine. The machine was brought into the U.S. from an OEM in Germany that is no longer in business. Traditionally, German code writing can be complex, which led to subsequent challenges for the customer. 

In addition, the system has a Siemens PLC with an FM357-2 module in it that was not functioning and needed to be replaced. These modules are not readily available—only from Siemens as a spare repaired unit. Once the module was replaced, it still needed to be configured, which not many people know how to do.

In conjunction with Siemens’ Hotline support, two of Premier Automation’s Senior Automation Engineers were able to determine the issues and get the machine back up and running. After several days of debugging and working through the code, Premier Automation was able to get the machine back into production.

To learn more, please visit premierautomation.com.