Every morning, Randy Sadler spends an hour walking the halls and talking to employees at Weidmuller USA. Don’t try to schedule a meeting with him then; this sacred time is blocked on his calendar. He’s getting to know the people and company once again from the inside – a building block for nurturing collaboration and innovation across departments that are critical in the company’s new expansion campaign.
Pietro Carnaghi Company Finds Success with Littelfuse AF0500 Arc-Flash Relay – Pietro Carnaghi SpA, an Italian company, has been designing and manufacturing machine tools for over 100 years. With around 1,500 machines installed globally, they are an industry leader in the production of high-precision, heavy-duty hydrostatic vertical turning and milling centers, movable portal milling machines (gantry), flexible manufacturing cell systems, and multi-tasking machines (Flexturn) that provide innovative, high-performance, and customized solutions.
PECM (Pulsed Electrochemical Machining) is a fast corrosion process that can form complicated geometries atom by atom. It is therefore ideal for the precise manufacturing of metal parts for high-tech applications. To integrate the core process into a fully automated, high-throughput production line, Voxel Innovations and Palmetto Mechatronics relied on the open PC-based control technology from Beckhoff.
Digital twins are a key component of the factory of the future – in fact, they are a key component now. The ability to create a digital model of any process, asset, product, and even facility—regardless of the complexity—transforms how manufacturers design, build, commission, maintain, and decommission all aspects of their operations. Rockwell Automation and Microsoft are helping manufacturers deploy digital twins to automate and optimize production, create resilient and predictable supply chains, empower the workforce, drive sustainability and ESG initiatives, as well as accelerate business transformation.
Good enclosure design means protecting not just the components inside but also any connectors being plugged into the device. A protruding plug can all too easily fall victim to accidental impact. This force can then be transmitted to the jack, damaging it and possibly any other nearby components. Connectors can be knocked during handling, transport or use – damaging the pins, housings or solder joints. Excessive stress from plugged-in cables being pulled or twisted can also cause damage. The obvious solution is a deep recess to help shield connectors from impact. Recesses are simple and effective but they can mean sacrificing enclosure capacity. So achieving the right compromise can be a fine balancing act.
One of the top concerns for manufacturers in 2025 will be finding new processes and solutions to increase their sustainability, particularly when it comes to the amount of energy used to adequately cool industrial enclosures. Achieving sustainable cooling depends largely on creating more efficient cooling systems that reduce waste and enable manufacturers to monitor and adjust cooling outputs in real time.
Data center growth is on the rise. In the U.S. alone, data center demand is expected to increase by 10% annually through 2030, and the global data center market is projected to be just as bullish during the next decade. The increase in the number of data centers to handle the amount of data generated and processed by artificial intelligence (AI) means the IT landscape is likely to look very different between today and 2030 — and much of this shift will center on the amount of energy required to power AI computing.
Ensuring safety in port operations is paramount, especially when it comes to heavy equipment like Rubber-Tired Gantry (RTG) cranes. At a large east coast ocean and inland river port, the need for reliable safety signals became critical as their existing equipment frequently failed due to environmental challenges. To address this, Pfannenberg’s PA X 5-05 signaling solution was implemented, offering a more durable and effective system to enhance safety and reduce costly maintenance. This article explores how the PA X 5-05 transformed safety protocols and operational efficiency for the port’s RTG crane operations.
Today’s manufacturing landscape is incorporating more industrial automation in outdoor environments than ever before. Energy & power, agriculture, and oil & gas processing are just a handful of the industries that require a unique kind of industrial enclosure that is adaptable and reliable, particularly in the face of harsh environmental conditions. While the idea of a bayable outdoor industrial enclosure is appealing, the cost of these solutions has in the past proven to be a challenge for manufacturers. Highly customized configurations, long lead times, and reliability concerns have made bayable outdoor industrial enclosures a non-starter in terms of saving time and money.
Laboratory instrumentation is almost always highly sensitive – and microfluidics devices are no exception. But that’s hardly surprising given the need to control cellular microenvironments with such high spatiotemporal precision. Manipulating and controlling fluids in sample volumes sufficiently small for lab-on-a-chip applications – perhaps to one-trillionth of a litre – requires absolute pinpoint accuracy. And the exacting demands placed on the electronics also apply to the enclosures safeguarding them.
As industrial projects and processes grow more complex, effective planning for maintenance and upgrades requires anticipating a wide variety of issues, especially when dealing with legacy systems. These older systems often bring unique challenges—from outdated components and limited compatibility to heightened security risks. When these issues aren’t addressed from the outset, they can create roadblocks that disrupt timelines, inflate budgets, and hinder overall project success.
The Safety Functional Requirements Specification (SFRS; sometimes referred to as SRS or Safety Requirements Specification) is the plan for the safety controls on a machine and is the second step of the safety lifecycle. The SFRS document serves as a framework for the safety control system design, is informed by prior work done in the risk assessment, and directly impacts the design and validation of the control system.
The compound annual growth rate of the global colocation market is expected to hover around 14% per year through 2030. This is driven by a couple of key factors, including the continued development and increase of AI computing, and the increasing number of companies that are migrating to colocations to reduce operating costs and increase the ROI on their IT equipment and capabilities. To truly capitalize on renting colocation space as opposed to building and operating a private data center, network engineers need to specify the right infrastructure — servers, enclosures, power distribution units (PDUs), and cooling units — to maximize network productivity and leverage data for meaningful business growth.
Skilled labor shortages are a familiar headache for the manufacturing industry. The problem has been looming for years and there is no end in sight. By 2030, manufacturers will need to fill 4 million jobs, with 2.1 million of these jobs at risk of going unfilled. This is the primary challenge for 71% of manufacturers, which in turn is putting immense pressure on the industry to find new ways to operate efficiently and maintain productivity and growth. To compensate, manufacturers are progressively turning to automation as the top solution. However, automation alone isn’t enough to solve the complex challenges, and that is where generative AI (GenAI) comes into play.
The ability to efficiently cool industrial enclosures is key in optimizing the performance of your automation infrastructure, especially in harsh manufacturing environments. But industrial enclosure heating is just as key to increasing the productivity and durability of your manufacturing programs, particularly in deployments where colder temperatures are the norm. Many of the same considerations designers account for with enclosure cooling still apply to specifying the ideal enclosure heaters, including: targeted heating with the appropriate thermal output; energy-efficient operation; and application versatility.
The adoption of busbar power distribution systems on a global scale has accelerated in the last few years. In fact, research estimates that the market for copper busbar power panels in North America alone will grow by nearly 7.5% annually through 2032. There are several factors that account for this growth and why manufacturers are moving fast to harness the benefits of busbar power, but safety and efficiency are two of the biggest drivers.
