Plug-in connector with electronic signal processing

The trend towards dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion in indus­try requires new solu­tions, this also applies for com­po­nents that were pre­vi­ous­ly pure­ly electro­mechan­i­cal in nature. Because with­out a pow­er­ful, com­pre­hen­sive infra­struc­ture, dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion hits its lim­its fast. The infra­struc­ture includes plug-in con­nec­tors and cables whose sig­nif­i­cance is set to rise and for exam­ple will be reflect­ed in intel­li­gent plug-in connectors.

The devel­op­ment of plug-in con­nec­tors is heav­i­ly influ­enced by three trends: dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, decen­tral­i­sa­tion and minia­tur­i­sa­tion. In decen­tral­i­sa­tion, increas­ing num­bers of func­tions in the indus­tri­al envi­ron­ment are shift­ing to the device and field lev­el, mean­ing that there will be an increas­ing demand for a com­pre­hen­sive con­nec­tion between devices along the hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal axes of the automa­tion pyra­mid. This also includes sup­ple­men­ta­tion with intel­li­gent func­tions. Inte­grat­ing sen­sor and diag­nos­tic func­tions direct­ly into the con­nec­tors opens up com­plete­ly new appli­ca­tion fields and ren­ders addi­tion­al sen­sors superfluous.

Mea­sured vari­ables like cur­rent, volt­age, pow­er and tem­per­a­ture can be mea­sured, as well as saved and eval­u­at­ed with an app, an ERP/SCADA sys­tem or a cloud. Such an intel­li­gent plug-in con­nec­tor is pre­sent­ed by Wei­d­müller for the first time at Han­nover Messe 2019. The smart plug-in con­nec­tor was cre­at­ed as part of the Ger­man Fed­er­al Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion and Research (BMBF) fund­ed project: “Intel­li­gent elec­tric plug-in con­nec­tor and con­nec­tion tech­nol­o­gy with elec­tron­ic sig­nal pro­cess­ing (ISA)”.