WIRE AND CONNECTOR USE INCREASES AS NEW NETWORKING FUNCTIONS ARE ADDED, AND DECREASES AS NETWORKS SIMPLIFY: Cabling Forever Crucial

摘要

WITH ALL THE COOL STUFF HAPPENING IN INDUSTRIAL NET-working, hardware can be easy to overlook. Wireless and Ethernet seem to be taking over the world. Interoperability is advancing everywhere. Fieldbuses are reaching into intrinsically safe areas. Sensors and transmitters are getting their own web servers. Plant floor and enterprise systems are linking up. Wires and related components just lie there. Not very exciting. So, who cares about cables, connectors, and cordsets? Everyone. That is, everyone who knows networking hardware still forms the backbone of their control, automation, and manufacturing applications, and quietly will continue to enable every rookie networking method that emerges in the future. Point-to-point 4-20 mA still dwarfs all other industrial networking methods, though twisted-pair fieldbuses and industrial Ethernet have scratched its surface lately. And, truth to tell, there are some pretty historic shifts occurring among the cable and connector sectors themselves. Eugene Wojciechowski, electrical commodity manager at Husky Injection Molding Systems Ltd. (www.husky.ca) in Bolton, Ontario, Canada, says his machines' field wiring is using more fieldbuses, localized I/O in two or three terminal boxes, 24 VDC power, and Profibus communications, which means they save on copper by using 5-20 ft cables, instead of the 50-100 ft point-to-point wires they used previously. "We have a lot of prox switches that are brought to a multi-port, IP67-rated distributed I/O box via M12 and M8 connectors, and we need cordsets to reach those switches," says Wojciechowski. "So, we try to buy as many preassembled cordsets as possible because it absolutely saves us on labor. We may only have 10% pre-made cables on a typical machine, but each machine has 75-100 cables with two to 65 conductors. It's the same wire, but it's often shorter."