Feature Panel Building
Will panel builders rule the world? N
uclear physicist, rocket scien- tist, panel builder - the last of these three groups is certainly the least glamourous but, like
the other two, it is at the coal face of cutting edge technology, and the coun- try would soon grind to a halt without the humble panel builder. Today, automation and control are
everywhere. Manufacturing and industry use it to constantly improve quality and productivity, public buildings are environments con- trolled to a tee, retailers use automa- tion to order their stock with military precision while monitoring every detail of consumer behaviour, mass transport is more automated than ever, and schools, hospitals and sports centres are all installing spe- cialist systems.
A changing role The image of a wireman remains somewhat old fashioned, yet in truth, panel building is not what it was, nor what it will be. The technology involved is subject to constant change and improvement, and today the rate of change is probably faster than ever. Another potent driving force is legislation, which constantly redefines safety and environmental performance. And control panels are not going to escape the drive for energy efficiency. In recent years we have seen the
contrary effects of the ebb and flow of the wider economy. As business levels turned down, control gear manufactur- ers tried to secure their share of orders by winning buyers over with improved products and new technolo- gies. Simultaneously, they thought lat- erally to find ways to take cost out of their customers’ activities. This last point is very significant.
Previously, the battle cry was always ‘cut costs’. However, increasingly now the drive is to improve value, add functionality, integrate operations, improve performance, increase sys- tems’ working life, design out operat- ing costs, cut energy use, and reduce down-time. And, the humble control panel is at the heart of all that.
Integration Using integrated technologies is one of the great driving forces of the day, and panel builders are the people who will provide the integration at industrial systems level. Traditional industrial functions, such as driving pumps and conveyors, air knives and tunnel ovens must be integrated with one
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Panel builders are the foot soldiers of the control and electrical engineering industry, and like today’s infantryman their job is undergoing radical technological change. Stuart Harvey of SoftStart UK predicts how things will develop over the next two to five years
Above: Stuart Harvey of SoftStart UK says that panel builders will have a vital role to play within industry - now and in the future
Below: panel builders are at the cutting edge of technology
another and with ever-more monitor- ing functions. Then they must be sequenced with other production plant. Energy consumption has to be optimised like never before and safety must be maintained. Meanwhile, raw data needs to be processed into high level information for feeding into the business systems, so computers need to be integrated into control panels, and they in turn need to integrate with computers in the offices above the pro- duction floor. Control technology, therefore, has
a lot of goals to achieve. Fortunately some manufacturers are ahead of the curve and are already integrating products and technologies, adding massive single-chip intelligence to previously dumb components, giving them communications capability, and developing drives and soft-starts to new levels. A good example of this is the HMI
in many locations and in many dif- ferent formats. In short the control panels are increasingly being inte- grated with the enterprise manage- ment computer systems.
Keeping management happy It is a fact of life that there is never adequate budget to realise the dreams of senior management, so panel builders have to look for new tech- nologies to help keep costs under con- trol. Plug and play equipment pulls out installation costs, integrated tech- nologies are usually far cheaper than separate, and modular software can be used like building blocks to create the perfect system for most applications. There is, naturally, a relationship
between panel size and cost, so miniaturised and compact solutions become attractive. Another natural phenomenon is that
once a panel has been installed for a few months, the powers that be will want to change it, with more functions and greater speed or integration with other parts of
the production process.
Modern, modular plug and play control gear is designed for just this as reconfig- uration is often now very simple where previously it could be next to impossi- ble. Trendy marketing types call this ‘future-proofing’ - wiremen prefer the term ‘sensible’. Either way, the end result is reduced down-time. Safety has come to the fore in recent
(human machine interface). A flat screen graphical display, a single HMI can replace an array of warning lights that would need to be individually wired-in and which would provide only the crudest of information. Today nearly all businesses need to
collect data from multiple sources, including production output, energy consumption, stock levels, plant per- formance and market predictions. This all needs to be analysed instantly and production plans auto- matically drawn up. The information has to be displayed to many people,
years, redefining panel layouts and acceptable practices. The need now is to make things absolutely idiot-proof and again today’s control gear manu- facturers have risen to the challenge by designing out inherent problems and even making installation mistakes vir- tually impossible. In conclusion, there has been and
continues to be massive innovation in control gear design, and panel builders have to constantly refine and develop their skill levels. As busi- nesses increasingly move to solu- tions-based management, control engineers will have to keep expand- ing their roles and responsibilities.
SoftStart UK
www.softstartuk.com T: 01493 660 510
Enter 206 MAY 2011 Electrical Engineering
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