Automation users worldwide are driven to minimize energy consumption to cut costs and comply with stringent environmental conditions. So...
Automation users worldwide are driven to minimize energy consumption to cut costs and comply with stringent environmental conditions. Some of the methods used include switching off equipment manually to installing semi-automated shutdown systems. These are crude, expensive or hard to manage.What is needed is a stnadardized way to manage energy consuming devices over production networks, eliminating the need for external systems and delivering a solution that can be configured intelligently using existing automation equipment. The PROFIenergy profile enables control devices viz; PLC's to send commands to energy consuming units(ECU's)to signal pauses such as lunch breaks, holidays, random line stoppage or even peak load conditions. On receipt of PROFIenergy commands, software agents in the ECU's hardware initiate predetermined sleep modes for the duration of pause. PROFIenergy commands are generally initiated by the same controller as the automation process. However a dedicated energy management controller can be used. PROFIenergy is applicable to single devices such as actuators and remote IO's as well as complete subsystems such as paint lines. PROFIenergy enables the deployment of smart energy management. Actual energy savings depend on how end users adapt PROFIenergy to their production environments.
