Designed with continuous processes
BBS technical university educates state-approved engineers in three disciplines: electrical, mechanical, and metals engineering.
This vocational school in the Hanover area is among the first to implement EPLAN Electric P8. As part of a final project, five graduates took on the task of designing and constructing a production system using the newest CAx technology. And there's more: During system operation, the CAx system can even be used to simplify maintenance tasks and quickly handle malfunctions. Anyone doubting the practical, modern, and professionally relevant education for engineers here should pay a visit to the Otto-Brenner school. It's a Hanover area vocational institution that educates state-approved engineers in three disciplines: electrical, mechanical, and metals engineering. Among other things, the laboratory at the technical university is equipped with a flexible production system that can automate a wide range of work proc-esses such as feeding, verification, handling, sorting and conveying. The system elements can be individually programmed and controlled, or operated as a net-worked system.
Good contacts in industry
According to senior teacher and graduate engineer, Heinz-Georg Meyer, the system conforms to the high standards used in the automobile industry. A Siemens S7 type PLC is used for controlling, and WinCC is used for visualization. The safety technology is also state-of-the-art. As a beta tester working closely with Phoenix Contact, the school is one of the first to gather experience using the Interbus Safety system. Given tight public budgets, it is no surprise that the central components of the robot, linear and mounting technologies were donated by industry enterprises such as Festo, Lenze, and Phoenix Contact. This shows how solid the cooperation is between the technical university and business. Indeed, many final projects (in the second year of the course, graduates have to complete an extensive project) are developed based on suggestions from companies, and are designed to achieve goals that will ultimately be put into practice.
Combining mechanical and electrical engineering
The main focus of many of the projects is the challenge of integrating me-chanical design with electrical engineering, and this is something that is "experienced live" at the university. That was certainly the case for one project promoted in the summer of 2006 by EPLAN. The challenge: The entire flexible production system was to be drafted using the new EPLAN Platform (that is, EPLAN Electric P8 and EPLAN Fluid) and, on the mechanical design side, Autodesk Inventor Professional.
Systematic approach, continuous workflow
The assignment was tackled by a team of three prospective electrical engineers and two future mechanical engineers. Before starting, they of course had to familiarize themselves with the software, which had just been launched on the market. To do this they were provided with training by EPLAN. In the first phase of the practical work, the five project participants (Jörg Machens, Marcus Mohr, Claas Röver, Matthias Lautenschläger-Schreiber and Andres Dörfler) gathered all of the electrical engineering and fluid power compo-nents. To do so, they were able in part to use the digital catalogs of the manufac-turers, for example the DKI catalog from Festo, which is integrated into EPLAN Fluid. The 3D views of components available in this catalog were then exported for the 3D view in Autodesk Inventor. The technicians worked with a "two-track" workflow. Jörg Machens: "We entered the components into EPLAN Electric P8 and EPLAN Fluid Project parts management, and simultaneously created a 3D image of the plant in Autodesk Inventor, which simplifies the creation of cable runs." Using the cable paths established in Autodesk Inventor, the cable diagrams could then be transferred to EPLAN Electric P8.
Satisfied with their work: Matthias Lautenschläger- Schreiber (left) and Jörg Machens (right), students at Otto-Brenner in Hanover.
The production system was reproduced entirely in EPLAN Electric P8 - the engineers use the documentation for commissioning and maintenance as well.
The project team used Autodesk Inventor to design the entire vocational school laboratory's flexible production system.
Electrical engineering and fluid power in one project
This allows electrical and mechanical elements to work smoothly together and simplify the designer's work. That leads not only to time savings, but also to synchronized data both on the electrical engineering and mechanical design levels. As a result, the five mechanical and electrical engineers had all of the hardware specifications stored in EPLAN Electric P8 and EPLAN Fluid and, because of the standardized data platforms of the two CAE programs, were able to design the entire electrical and fluid power structure for the flexible production system all in one single project.
Interface with maintenance software
Up to this point the project had "only" used the possibilities offered by inno-vative Computer Aided Engineering (CAE). The next phase included the development work. The challenge: Development of a communications system that transfers data to EPLAN Electric P8 and EPLAN Fluid in the case of system malfunction.
New tasks for CAE: Find the causes of malfunctions more quickly
This too was a success. When a malfunction occurs that is registered by the PLC, the control system sends a message to EPLAN Electric P8 where the device tag associated with the error is then called up. This in turn calls up the schematic in which the device tag in question is selected on the screen. The screen view is also linked to additional component images and data in order to provide an additional visual display of the error source. Jörg Machens: "This allows us to later implement the CAE system, which is actually necessary for development, in sub-sequent machine or system life cycles." Machine users will be pleased with this news: simplified maintenance will shorten planned and, in particular, unplanned outages because service personnel will be able to find the causes more quickly. Electrical engineers at Otto-Brenner have long been involved with discovering new intervention technologies for minimizing malfunctions and outage times. The flexible manufacturing plant can also be operated and even programmed via the "remote-controlled laboratory" on the Internet (www.tsh.ipactive.de). Using a web cam, operations and service personnel can always check the current status of the system, whether they are on location or not.
Follow-up projects a possibility
The work of the five engineers is not quite done yet - and of course their two supervising teachers, Heinz-Georg Meyer (mechanical engineering) and Dieter Hennigs (electrical engineering), won't inform them yet of the grades they will be getting for their final project. But they are satisfied with the way the engineers approached and tackled the tasks. Heinz-Georg Meyer: "This project is definitely something special for our lab. It has a research character to it because EPLAN Electric P8 and EPLAN Fluid are so new - it's great that EPLAN had confidence in us and was willing to provide us with the software early on. The contact between the school and the company actually came from the EPLAN salesman Jan Fleming, who also graduated from Otto-Brenner. At this point there are 16 EPLAN jobs available to the school, which in turn offers us follow-up project opportunities as well as the chance to provide a modern education to engineers using the most state-of-the-art CAE software."
