As the number of I/O and sensor components, controllers and HMIs that can be mounted in the field has surged in the last years, increasingly larger parts of the overall controller architecture can be directly mounted on the machine. Until now, however, the power supply equipment always needed to be safely placed in a central but often remotely located control cabinet. The disadvantage is that the distribution of supply voltages as low as 24 V over large distances requires high currents in order to provide loads with the power they need. This leads to high losses and requires large conductor cross sections.
ifm’s IP67 power supplies, which can be mounted directly in the field, enable decentralised power supply. This means that large distances can be realised with a higher voltage, which requires smaller currents for the same amount of power, leading to lower losses. Moreover, the IO-Link-capable onsite 24 V power supplies allow computer-aided monitoring, configuration, and diagnostics. Thus, faults that need to be fixed can be solved quickly and from a central location. This leads to increased uptimes and the overall efficiency of the system goes up.
Advantages of the intelligent power supply are:
• Robust IP65/IP67 housing for installation without control cabinet: This ensures protection against electrical and mechanical hazards. Moreover, the integrated surge protection eliminates the need for external circuit protection.
• Supply and output connectors in accordance with industry standards: The supply of sensors and actuators via a single cable enables a separately protected current distribution with less loss both for sensors (Us) and for actuators (Ua), or simply two supplies to be split by means of a T splitter.
• Supply diagnostics and load display on the device: A 12-segment LED bar graph displays the current demand of the overall system, and the current demand of each channel as a percentage of the protection configured for each single output circuit.
• Configurable voltage and electronic circuit breakers for each supply channel: For every output circuit, the integrated output protection with pre-alarm and usage diagnostics can be configured in real time.
The integrated circuit breakers protect your system against overload and short circuits, and can each be separately configured between 1 and 12 amperes.
• Allowance for the voltage drop: To ensure that sufficiently high voltages are provided where they are needed, the cable resistance can be taken into account when configuring the system. The operating voltage of the system can be set in the configuration menu to values between 24 and 28 V. Calculation of the voltage drop for any system installed is recommended.
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