Rethinking the design and assembly of control cabinets
Weidmüller, which specialises in solutions for general control cabinet building has developed a new approach to supplying cabinets which was featured at the recent Hanover Fair in Germany.
The typical procedure for building control cabinets focuses on the value-creation chain of planning and design, purchasing, storing, mounting and marking, wiring, checking and initialising — as well as service and maintenance.
However, Weidmüller perceives the focus in the future being less on individual products (bottom-up) but with more emphasis on the cost-effective overall plan (top-down), requiring coherent interaction of products, services and software tools (networking). — simplifying the process for the customer.
With the exhibits in the ‘Future zone’ and presentation of innovations, the company showed how this is not mere theory. The ideas presented in the ‘Future zone’ were real or modified forms of product concepts that Weidmüller is currently realising.
‘Future zone’ featured function-oriented control-cabinet building illustrating the process of selecting, identifying and fixing components on a DIN rail using modular terminal blocks as an example.
The stand also showed how a robot could mount components in a control cabinet using positioning information by RailDesigner software with direct interface to the superordinate computer-aided engineering system. Components to be mounted are structurally optimised for automated assembly, with the current high number of product variants reduced by a 3-pitch strategy.
