Heavy Industrial Process Management

Oil, and its plastic and rubber derivatives, alongside metals and other raw materials are all fantastic resources with an indefinite number of uses.

Everything you see or touch today will have interacted with these products somehow. They’re in constant demand, meaning constant production is the name of the game.

Keeping this production going is imperative, and the monumental task is undertaken by an incredible range of heavy machinery, working to tight tolerances.

These processes are often hot, messy and violent, which makes automation the clear choice for hazardous environments.

Whether you’re extracting, extruding, annealing, bending, cutting, pressing, welding, or anything in between, Beckhoff’s PC-based raw material processing control has an internationally proven record for efficiency, safety and simplicity at the point of use.

Fast, accurate and precise automation for metalworking brings great advantages to both product throughput, waste reduction and process control.

EtherCAT I/O fieldbuses and cables form the backbone of such a system, providing real-time, high-bandwidth intercommunication between the hardy process equipment and the overseeing governing industrial PC.

With EtherCAT, synchronisation of process and control equipment to as short a timescale as 10 nanoseconds becomes possible, making on-the-fly adjustment to even hair-width precise tolerances a breeze.

A similarly unmatched level of process control is achieved with TwinCAT for offshore and petrochemical applications.

Besides the inconvenience of the remote location, boats and rigs in the middle of the ocean face a very hostile environment which further complicates all aspects of production, from logistics and maintenance, to extraction and troubleshooting.

TwinCAT, with EtherCAT, offers a completely integrated solution, gathering and collating vast amounts of data from every corner of the system down into an actionable form.

This now useable data is then presented through a user-intuitive Windows PC-based graphical interface, reducing the training learning curve and allowing complete intercompatibility between plant-wide TwinCAT systems.