Compact positioning drive with IO-Link

When for­mats are changed on pro­duc­tion machines such as pack­ag­ing machines, label­ers, tex­tile machines, print­ing machines or wood-pro­cess­ing machines, pre­cise and repro­ducible posi­tion­ing is always cru­cial. As well as opti­miz­ing machine set­up times, ful­ly auto­mat­ed posi­tion­ing dri­ves can pre­vent incor­rect set­tings, which in turn pre­vents waste and dam­age. Siko posi­tion­ing dri­ves can do all this by design, but are now avail­able for the first time ever with an IO-Link inter­face. For exam­ple, the new AG03/1 IO-Link posi­tion­ing drive.

Plug & Play with IO-Link

The AG03/1 posi­tion­ing dri­ve enables fast inte­gra­tion via a point-to-point con­nec­tion using sim­ple I/O con­nec­tion tech­nol­o­gy. Thanks to the open, man­u­fac­tur­er-inde­pen­dent stan­dard of the IO-Link inter­face, con­ve­nient inte­gra­tion options are avail­able for machine con­trol sys­tems from all lead­ing providers. IO-Link mas­ter com­po­nents can be used to net­work mul­ti­ple devices on a mod­u­lar basis. This reduces com­plex­i­ty and cabling out­lay as well as the costs involved in com­mis­sion­ing. The stan­dard­ized wiring, com­bined with addi­tion­al diag­nos­tic fea­tures, improves ser­vice­abil­i­ty and reduces down­times in the event of errors. The IO-Link mas­ter allows para­me­ter data to be read from a field device, stored, and loaded onto a new device of the same type when the old one is replaced – even while the process is still running.

Communication right to the cloud

In the Indus­try 4.0 (smart fac­to­ry) envi­ron­ment it is often not enough to exchange pure process data; rather, the com­mu­ni­ca­tion must also enable val­ues to be retrieved for diag­nos­tic pur­pos­es, such as final stage tem­per­a­ture, motor cur­rent, and var­i­ous volt­age val­ues. The elec­tron­ic type plate fur­ther offers clear iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the unit type, plus the ser­i­al num­ber and the hard­ware and soft­ware ver­sions, which also facil­i­tates plan­ning of main­te­nance intervals.

Condition monitoring and predictive maintenance

Siko posi­tion­ing dri­ves pro­vide spe­cif­ic data via the IO-Link inter­face, so that it can be used for tasks such as con­di­tion mon­i­tor­ing and pre­dic­tive main­te­nance in cen­tral­ized, high­er-lev­el sys­tems, in some cas­es in the cloud. With the open IO-Link stan­dard, a wide range of net­work com­po­nents from var­i­ous man­u­fac­tur­ers is avail­able so that seam­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion can be real­ized from the field lev­el up to the cloud, secure­ly and simply.

Minimum installation spaces

Even with axle spac­ings of just 37 mm, the two adja­cent AG03/1 posi­tion­ing dri­ves do not inter­fere with each oth­er and so can be used with axles that are very close­ly posi­tioned to one anoth­er. Inte­grat­ed with the posi­tion­ing dri­ve in a com­pact hous­ing just 80 mm deep is the posi­tion mea­sur­ing sys­tem, all the con­trol elec­tron­ics, and the IO-Link interface.

50W drive for a wide spectrum of applications

The brush­less 24V EC motor has an out­put of 50W, is not sub­ject to wear and so offers a long ser­vice life. Yet its 3.2 Nm of torque and its max­i­mum speed of up to 100 rpm ensure top per­for­mance for adjust­ments of for­mats, stops, and tools. The absolute mag­net­ic mea­sur­ing sys­tem, with 1600 steps per rev­o­lu­tion, out­puts posi­tion val­ues with high res­o­lu­tion – over the entire trav­el path of ±6250 rev­o­lu­tions. Accord­ing­ly, ref­er­ence move­ments on dri­ve start­up are no longer nec­es­sary. Fur­ther, the mag­net­ic mea­sur­ing sys­tem has proven to be resis­tant to dirt, mois­ture, shock, and vibrations.