Driving forward July 1st 2007 Mitsubishi Electric AC drives are
continuing to develop. Their
increasing intelligence opens up
the possibility of local process
control. The effect is drives will
adopt some PLC functionality.
Mitsubishi's Guy Kennett
suggests that within a few years
many drives will have IEC61131
programming capabilities, just like
a PLC or intelligent drive. However
they will tend to have their
intelligence capped at being equal
to micro and small PLCs or PAC
but this would be unattractive to
users who would consider the
resultant architecture to be
restrictive when it came to later
systems reconfiguration. More articles from Mitsubishi Electric Europe: |