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Motors and Drives


Developing the motors of the future at a time of crisis


Mads Vernon Jørgensen reports on how a Danish motion control specialist decided to focus on new development as the economic crisis took firm hold of global economies in 2008.


W


hen the global economic crisis took hold in 2008, it was necessary throughout the world to make a series of decisions for future strategy. The same was true for Danish motion control specialists JVL


Industri Elektronik A/S. Should the company steer through the crisis as best as


possible by generally adapting to the situation - or should JVL focus on the future and on new development? After closer study and surveys amongst representatives, agents and customers in Europe and the USA, a new strategy was drawn up. It proposed radically to invest heavily in new product development. So instead of focussing on sales, which were under pressure anyway due to the crisis, attention was directed to development and to the future once the crisis was over. This meant employing new development engineers. At the same time, sales staff and production were aligned with actual market conditions. The plan was that when the crisis was over, JVL would


be able to offer the servo motor of the future, in the range 50W to 3.0kW, based on industrial Ethernet – i.e. EtherCAT for the European market and EtherNet/IP for the American market.


Industrial Ethernet will become the motor interface of the future – partly due to the immense support by large industrial companies such as Siemens, Rockwell, Beckhoff, Schneider, B&R, Phoenix, etc, and partly because of its relative low price for a high-speed interface bus. Moreover, the goal is that by 2013 at the latest, JVL will be the leader in industrial Ethernet for integrated servo motors - worldwide. To achieve that goal, other industrial Ethernet buses such


as Profinet, Powerlink, Sercos III would be continuously developed when needs arise. In addition, Profibus, CANopen and Devicenet modules would be updated in both software and hardware so that communication with the basic motor could be achieved at up to 2Mbit/s via the MODBUS interface.


The situation today


Today JVL has industrial Ethernet modules with EtherCAT and Ethernet/IP which are already installed in machines in Germany and the US. Powerlink was to completed in May 2011. A new high-speed MODBUS interface has been developed


for all JVL’s integrated motors. And fieldbus systems have been generally upgraded. JVL thus now stands stronger than ever with a complete programme of integrated servo motors in the range 50 to 75W. The larger, 1.5 kW and 3.0kW integrated servo motors are under development and will be launched at the upcoming SPS/IPC/Drives trade-fair in Nuremburg in the autumn of 2011. Today, customers prefer a network interface between the


PLC/pc and motor control. This can be achieved very simply with JVL’s new Ethernet modules, which enable the PLC to control the servo 100 per cent.All registers, positions, speeds and error messages can be mirrored to the PLC at very high speed, typically within 100 to 200µs. Since JVL supports explicit and cyclic messages (implicit),


the company’s motors can be used with almost all PLCs and computers. In the motor itself it is only a matter of configuring a few parameters, and in the example of an Ethernet PLC configuring corresponding parameters to identify the correct values, for example five read and five write (cyclic) variables. To quickly get started with JVL’s integrated motors, the


M12 Ethernet connector is mounted and AC or DC supply connected. The motor is then largely ready to run: no driver to mount in a cabinet, nor a maze of cables and connectors to be fitted. The integrated Ethernet motor is the solution that all


Fig. 1. JVL’s MAC motor - 750W - a solution for larger power ratings.


58 www.engineerlive.com


machinery producers have been waiting for - and will use in the coming years.


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