How to save Energy on Automation
Energy is one of the biggest costs in automotive manufacturing. It’s also under various pressures, such as security of supply. Governments are becoming concerned about climate change and are calling on manufacturing industries to reduce their carbon footprint. In light of this PROFIBUS organisation and PROFINET International (PI) were asked to provide functions and mechanisms for PROFINET that support energy-efficient production. PI worked on a vendor-neutral energy savings profile called PROFIenergy. The objective is to develop a uniform (standardised) interface for data exchange between a controller and a wide range of devices with energy savings options. The profile will be used for exchanging data and commands, but will not contain any logic functions in terms of process control.
With this technology, which is currently used in PCs throughout the world, the controller passes into an extreme energy savings mode.
The PROFINET IO-based energy efficiency functions and the Wake on LAN command will provide plant operators in the future a means of optimizing the overall energy balance within a plant. The success of this approach is contingent on a speedy standardisation by PI and quick-turnaround implementation of functions within components. In addition, new energy management tools are needed to close the gaps between production planning and production equipment control.
Only the connection to the network is kept alive in order to react to the wake-up command in the form of the ‘Magic Packet’. Besides this mode, three other modes are conceivable:
Mode 0: All energy-consuming systems of components are shut down, switches integrated into the component and the PROFINET IO stack are deactivated, and safety-relevant functions of components are no longer supported; a changeover to operating mode can only be initiated by the ‘Magic Packet’.
Mode 1: This mode was defined specially for highly integrated components. It differs from Mode 0 only in that the PROFINET IO stack and, thus, the integrated switches remain activated ” meaning that the network infrastructure continues to function. I/O statuses of the component are still not available, and the transition to a higher mode is initiated by a standardised PROFINET protocol.
Mode 2: This is targeted specifically at modular I/O modules. In this mode, the PROFINET IO stack and the integrated switches are active, and I/O statuses and safety-relevant functions are available in some cases, depending on the preceding configuration. The transition to operating mode is initiated by a standardised PROFINET protocol.
Mode 3: Operating mode ” all subsystems of the component are activated, and the component signals that it is ‘ready to operate’.
PROFINET IO needs the information about the energy efficiency modes which would be useful for the future power management that will help describe the capabilities of the GSDML file components. That would help indicate on which modes of energy efficiency the component supports along with the length of the power-up times until it reaches the “ready-to-operate” status.
Saving of energy by PI.
A standardised diagnostic information will be provided using the record data about the status of the component which was used in making decisions on eliminating the mapping of the functions and status information and turning it into a pure I/O interface. The current content of the data record can be read and written via cyclic read/write services.
For more information on this topic, do watch the video below
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