Feature: Enclosures
Driven by Industry 4.0 Te move toward specifying plastic enclosures for industrial electronics is being driven by a very powerful force – Industry 4.0. IoT/IIoT smart factories depend on huge amounts of data, to optimise workflows, boost productivity, enhance quality, cut costs, improve flexibility, reduce downtime and preventative maintenance. Cyber-physical systems that allow real-time monitoring and
control of automation rely on Big Data analytics. All that data must be harvested by many sensors all around the factory. Tose sensors need to be housed in small, compact enclosures. Tese housings must be tough but also cost effective and easy to install because of the sheer number of units required. New plastic enclosures for sensors feature cleverly-designed mounting lugs that allow units to be either cable- tied or screwed into position, easily and quickly. Models such as OKW’s EASYTEC (IP 65) also feature a concave
recess on the rear. Tis provides added stability when these ASA+PC- FR enclosures are mounted on rails and tubes. Te housings are held together with Torx fixing screws as standard, deterring tampering. IoT/IIoT is such an important market that OKW swiſtly followed
up EASYTEC with another new sensor enclosure, MINI-DATA-BOX. It, too, features mounting lugs for cable ties and screws – but unlike
EASYTEC, the housings can also be specified without them for desktop use. MINI-DATA-BOX also exemplifies enclosure manufacturers’
growing obsession with aesthetics, which the MINI-DATA-BOX takes to another level. It offers contoured corners and a diamond- cut lid, and, with its tiny size of just 40 x 40 x 15mm, fits discreetly in any position on a machine. In addition, OKW unveiled a new colour option for the flanged variant – traffic white and traffic grey A – to complement the existing standard choices of traffic white and anthracite grey. At OKW we’ve been making all the specialist standard
enclosures as application ready, so they require little customisation. Even though almost every standard enclosure needs some form of customisation – mainly machining of apertures and printing of legends and logos – new technology has allowed us to do this faster and more cost-effectively. Photo- quality digital printing and machine-readable laser marking make it very easy to manufacture customised enclosures with consecutive barcodes or numbering. All this is available in ever-smaller batches, making customisation viable even for very low volumes.
www.electronicsworld.co.uk July/August 2023 55
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