PROFIenergy explained at June conference

Starting from an initiative proposed by AIDA, a group of automotive manufacturing companies in Germany, who sought to improve the energy efficiency of their automated manufacturing plants, PROFIBUS International (PI) has developed and introduced PROFIenergy.

This is a solution for the energy management of production equipment, which uses existing factory PROFINET communications to switch off selected equipment components or even entire systems during normal idle times, such as weekends and holidays, and also during other brief intervals and unscheduled pauses.

PROFIenergy allows the power consumption of automation equipment in manufacturing (such as robot assembly cells, laser cutters and sub-systems such as paint lines) to be managed over a PROFINET network.

No external hard-wired systems are required, the profile can be integrated into individual components by means of a firmware update.

PROFIenergy technology will be described and explained further at the annual PROFIBUS and PROFINET User Conference, scheduled for 29-30 June 2010 at Stratford-on-Avon, alongside several other papers that discuss how PROFIBUS and PROFINET systems can be integrated into energy management programmes, particularly in relation to energy efficient drives.

More details on the conference can be found at: www.profi-bus.co.uk