Featured Articles

The articles featured below are staff written and contributed and/or provided by our industry partners. To submit an idea or abstract, please email owenhurst@panelbuilderus.com

Those of you in the food industry are already familiar with the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)—a law that focuses on preventing contamination, rather than reacting to the problem after the fact. A big part of FSMA compliance has to do with the design of plant equipment, which includes the electrical components that provide power to manufacturing lines.

Beyond the basic considerations that are part of an end user’s enclosure selection process for their IT deployment – such as dimensions, weight, and color/finish – are important factors that contribute to the enclosure’s long-term value and performance. If you’re in the market for IT enclosures and want to be confident that you’re choosing the best for your needs – today’s and those you’ll have in the future – you need to first evaluate a manufacturers’ ability to demonstrate their expertise in these areas:

Outdoor kiosks have grown in popularity in a wide variety of applications and sectors, including banking, entertainment, retail, showrooms, industrial and education. You see kiosks everywhere, from banks and airports, to theme parks and train stations. Often located outdoors, kiosks and the sensitive electronics they contain are subjected to extreme temperatures, from the cold of winter to the heat of summer. Ambient temperatures can exceed 40°C or below 10°C. Heat loads for the electronics themselves can range from 20 to more than 200 Watts. These extreme temperatures and heat loads can often exceed the operating temperature limits of the sensitive electronics inside, which in turn can affect their functionality and lifespan.

Ask any data center facility manager what keeps them up at night, and the answer is usually the same: fear of downtime. That’s because with each minute of data center downtime, the risk of serious loss increases. Around a third of all reported outages cost more than $250,000, with many exceeding $1 million. The good news? An Uptime Institute report shows that most IT service disruptions are preventable, with 80% of respondents admitting that their most recent outage could have been avoided.

During these weeks, with the COVID-19 outbreaks, it has been possible to observe how certain facilities (not only hospitals but also hotels, sports centers, libraries …) had to adapt to the emergency state by changing their original design, operation and action protocols, and structural, mechanical, pneumatic and electrical systems. In this following article, we will focus on these three last topics.

In recognition of Women’s History Month, Rittal recognizes their women in manufacturing. The following is their first installment of Rittal's “We are Rittal!” mini-series, based off their We are #RittalStrong, #RittalResilient, #RittalWomen campaign. Diane Rudolph joined Rittal 22 years ago as a Safety & Environmental Engineer. In her time she has held various roles within the organization; her current role is Director of Material Services.

Automation is a target that many in the industrial sector are chasing. However, converting existing facilities into smart facilities can be a costly and time-consuming undertaking. For a company to implement smart manufacturing, its machinery and equipment must be able to communicate with each other and across a network.

Data centers are some of the most energy-intensive of all building types, gobbling up 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of the typical commercial office building, according to energy.gov. Combined, data centers represent approximately 2% of total U.S. electricity use. Much of that 2% is dedicated to keeping servers from overheating.

Climate control is critical to automated systems. Excessive heat and fluctuating temperatures can ruin electronics, impairing their operations and lowering the service life of electrical equipment. Even just a 5–10degree increase in the operating temperature of a device over an extended period of time can affect its speed and reliability, with solid–state devices starting to break down and fail at temperatures exceeding 120°F.

Rittal is one of the first industrial players to receive a 5G frequency allocation. Before the end of the year, a private 5G mobile communications network will be installed in the new Haiger plant. The first pilot projects, for example in production monitoring and analysis, have already been defined.

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Expanded Communications and Analog I/O Capabilities for the BRX PLC

New expansion I/O modules from AutomationDirect for the BRX stackable micro brick PLC include communications modules, universal analog I/O modules, and universal temperature combination I/O modules. Expansion modules snap onto the side of any BRX Micro PLC Unit (MPU) or BRX Remote I/O controller, creating a sturdy and rugged PLC platform.

Added BRX serial communications modules ($159.00) provide four isolated RS-232 ports that support communications flow control or RS-422 serial ports. Also available are BRX single-channel RS-232 (with flow control) and RS-422 Pluggable Option Modules ($49.00). Supported protocols include Do-more! Protocol, Modbus RTU (Master/Slave), K-Sequence, and ASCII (In/Out). Data rates are 1200 to 115,200 bps.

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