Detecting leaks with IO-Link

Employ­ees at Bürk­ert plants are equip­ping more and more com­po­nents with IO-Link. The automa­tion spe­cial­ists are notic­ing an increased demand for the tech­nol­o­gy. As part of Bürk­ert Live on the occa­sion of SPS 2021 from 23 to 25 Novem­ber, the engi­neers will there­fore show appli­ca­tions based on IO-Link.

“IO-Link brings us and our cus­tomers many advan­tages, espe­cial­ly in terms of cabling. We real­ly only have to make sure that the mas­ter and the device are no more than 20 meters apart.”

- Michael Rausch, Seg­ment Manager

In addi­tion: many cables mean high poten­tial for errors, strands get twist­ed or con­nec­tors are placed incor­rect­ly. IO-Link relies on stan­dard plugs, which makes it impos­si­ble to mix them up.

Fewer cables and more data

But this not only saves cables. The infor­ma­tive val­ue of the data from the devices is bet­ter, Bürk­ert says. “We not only have the infor­ma­tion good or bad, but we can tap into much more diag­nos­tic data to derive run­time errors, for exam­ple.” This could then be used to detect leaks, for exam­ple, accord­ing to the plan of Bürk­ert’s devel­op­ers. “This was also pos­si­ble in the past, but it was asso­ci­at­ed with con­sid­er­able costs. Con­trols had to be repro­grammed and feed­back devices had to be queried.” This often deterred cus­tomers, because, for exam­ple, just one error in the pro­gram­ming caused addi­tion­al effort, in the worst case brought pro­duc­tion to a standstill.

Step chains remain

Are the 32 input and out­put bytes suf­fi­cient for the process data? “I was skep­ti­cal at the begin­ning. For our valves, that’s suf­fi­cient, and if the user wants more data, he can switch to Eth­er­net-capa­ble devices and even more process data will be available.”

Still, some users are skep­ti­cal. In man­u­fac­tur­ing, the user needs new mas­ters, so switch­ing to IO-Link com­mu­ni­ca­tion is a good idea as part of a mod­ern­iza­tion project. “Just chang­ing every­thing over dur­ing main­te­nance won’t work,” Rausch empha­sizes. How­ev­er, he encour­ages his cus­tomers to use IO-Link. The step chains remain in place and the cus­tomer posi­tions him­self for the future.