Digital junction box

With Siwarex DB, Siemens is launch­ing a dig­i­tal junc­tion box for weigh­ing appli­ca­tions with robust field hous­ing in IP66 pro­tec­tion on the mar­ket. It can be inte­grat­ed eas­i­ly into Simat­ic envi­ron­ments. The Siwarex DB extends the Siemens weigh­ing tech­nol­o­gy port­fo­lio and through its seam­less net­work­ing ensures that indi­vid­ual ana­log load cells can now be acquired and eval­u­at­ed more com­pre­hen­sive­ly than ever before. They can be used both for the tar­get­ed mon­i­tor­ing of weigh­ing process­es and for extend­ed diag­nos­tics. Any error mes­sages are dis­played cen­tral­ly on the Simat­ic con­troller and the HMI.

The seam­less con­nec­tion of the con­trol unit and Siwarex WP weigh­ing elec­tron­ic enables imme­di­ate diag­nos­tics of the load cells. This makes ser­vic­ing quick­er and eas­i­er, and min­i­mizes down­times. In order to pre­vent inac­cu­rate or incor­rect mea­sure­ments, the weigh­ing mod­ules must oper­ate pre­cise­ly. An essen­tial require­ment for this is com­plete trans­paren­cy regard­ing the sta­tus of the devices. Siwarex DB offers the option of con­nect­ing the scales with up to four load cells, thus pro­vid­ing the required flex­i­bil­i­ty in plant plan­ning. A new fea­ture is the sin­gle-chan­nel mon­i­tor­ing of each con­nect­ed load cell. For exam­ple, error con­di­tions such as wire break or over­load can be detect­ed and removed specif­i­cal­ly, mak­ing ser­vic­ing eas­i­er. With Siwarex DB, the use of a mul­ti­me­ter is a thing of the past. Siwarex DB can also be used in a wide range of appli­ca­tions in the field of indus­tri­al weigh­ing tech­nol­o­gy, such as lev­el mon­i­tor­ing, silo or con­tain­er weighing.

By using a Siwarex WP231 as the weigh­ing elec­tron­ic, direct con­nec­tion to a Simat­ic S7 CPU for the Simat­ic S7-1200 sys­tem is sup­port­ed. For the dis­trib­uted Simat­ic ET 200SP sys­tem, on the oth­er hand, the use of Siwarex WP321 is rec­om­mend­ed. Seam­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion between Siwarex and Simat­ic reduces effort dur­ing com­mis­sion­ing. If, for exam­ple, height com­pen­sa­tion is required dur­ing com­mis­sion­ing, the load of each indi­vid­ual load cell can be viewed imme­di­ate­ly using the Siwarex WP weigh­ing electronics.

The Siwarex DB dig­i­tal junc­tion box can be used to retro­fit exist­ing plants with min­i­mal effort. If the sim­i­lar Siwarex JB solu­tion is already in use, it can be sim­ply replaced with the Siwarex DB (which has the same dimen­sions) and con­nect­ed to the exist­ing cables. Anoth­er advan­tage for the user is that there is no change to the nor­mal oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures with­in the Siwarex weigh­ing elec­tron­ics and Simatic.