Development of control units

Schaltschrank / Steuerungsbau, Sondermaschinen

Nearly every machine or device with more or less complex motion sequences requires a control unit, in order to ‘come to life'. At the same time, each movement must be specifically controlled depending on all different kinds of conditions. Depending on the available media (electricity, compressed air, hydraulic systems) or ambient conditions, an ideal control unit type is selected and implemented. Among others, the following are available for this purpose:

  • simple electric control units based on relay circuits
  • either set up simply and clearly arranged with push-buttons and switches or convenient and visually appealing with touch-screen control panel
  • purely pneumatic control units, for example for application in explosion-prone areas

In order to design an ideal machine control system, we particularly concentrate on the following basic modules in control engineering, irrespective of the control unit model:

  • Functional description
  • Component list
  • Timing chart, displacement-time graph or displacement-step graph
  • Sequence diagrams
  • Circuit diagram