Maintaining heavily used and hard-to-reach bus cables faster than ever is what i.Sense CF.D, the igus monitoring module, can do – and nothing else in the world can. The module automatically recognises the positions of stressed areas in a cable and shows them very precisely in metres. The new optical status display now enables users to intervene quickly in a targeted manner, avoiding time-consuming and costly troubleshooting.
Monday morning in a car factory: a robot welds body parts together. Thanks to a seventh axis, the robot moves in a large work area, its data supplied with Ethernet cables. A technician opens the welding robot’s control cabinet to see whether all Ethernet cables are working correctly. But the i.Sense CF.D monitoring module’s coloured signal lamps show that the transmission quality in one cable is weakening. Three different types of Ethernet cable are often used on the robot: a static cable from the control cabinet to the seventh-axis e-chain, a chainflex bus cable in the e-chain system and a chainflex robot cable for torsional movement on the robot. External influences can cause transmission quality malfunctions here. But the cables are very long and difficult to reach in many places. “In such cases, searching for and fixing errors is often time-consuming and expensive,” says Richard Habering, Head of the smart plastics Division at igus, and he knows from experience. “We have therefore developed a new function for the i.Sense CF.D monitoring module that is so far offered nowhere else in the world: an optical status display with precise information on the distance to the suspected fault location.”
Simply read the risk area from the OLED display
i.Sense CF.D continuously measures transmission properties and various electrical parameters over millions of cycles. The system thus not only detects data losses in real time, but also identifies the position of the stressed area of the cable very precisely. “This information, which appears directly on the module’s OLED display, enables users to identify the risk area faster and in a more targeted manner than ever and immediately replace the cable for the segment in question without trial and error – and without additional tools or software costs.”
More information: E-mail: ralloli@igus.net, www.igus.in
