RS offers Omron Automation’s Value Design for Panel system — a comprehensive portfolio of industrial control panel products designed to help panel builders, machine builders and end-users reduce their total cost of ownership.
Control panels are essential to industrial operations — a virtually inescapable cost of doing business — and have been for some time, generating steady global market demand. Now, the increased adoption of Industry 4.0 trends and technologies — including automation, machine learning, the IIoT, AI, robotics, edge and cloud computing, digital twins, and virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) — has market demand surging. The global industrial control panel market is currently valued at $15 billion and is projected to grow to a value of $25 billion by 2033.
The complexity and cost involved in designing industrial control panels can vary widely. Some industry experts estimate that panel design and engineering costs often account for approximately 45% of total control panel cost, or roughly the same as all the components and devices they contain, while others claim that it can account for up to a whopping 80% of the total cost. As such, solutions engineered to ease design complexity, optimize performance, minimize labor, and facilitate future growth — like Omron Automation’s Value Design for Panel system — can have an outsize impact on total cost of ownership.
Omron Automation’s Value Design for Panel system offers a wide variety of essential control and switching components engineered to speed up panel design and engineering, simplify integration, improve efficiency, reliability, and durability, support scalability and sustainability, and reduce downtime, including limit switches, relays, pushbuttons, timers, and counters.
These components feature:
- Slim form factors with standardized heights that reduce dead space and support side-by-side mounting at 55°C ambient temperatures and, in turn, enable simplified, high-density layouts that conserve available space, maximize functionality, improve thermal management and product lifetimes, and facilitate scalability.
- Unified top and bottom I/O terminals with Push-in Plus technology and Front-in/Front-release Wiring that enable the quick, easy, and reliable termination of stranded wires, single wires, and ferrules, reducing wiring work by ~60% compared to hard-wired screw terminal solutions while also improving safety, workability, and vibration resistance and eliminating the threat of accidental disconnection.
- eCAD libraries and CE, UL, and CSA certifications that simplify the design and build process — reducing electrical design drawing and data creation work by up to 50% while minimizing errors — and significantly accelerate global deployment, shortening lead times.
- Green design elements that conserve energy and resources, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and support organizations’ efforts to achieve carbon neutrality.
and include:
- Control components essential for end-to-end automation solutions, such as DIN rail power supplies, temperature controllers, timers, counters, digital panel meters, programmable relays, and energy monitoring devices.
- Switching components designed to make manufacturing flexibility more attainable than ever, such as limit switches, basic switches, pushbutton switches and indicators, wireless pushbutton switches, electromechanical relays, solid-state relays, terminal blocks, magnetic contactors, and monitoring products, including monitoring relays, thermal image controllers, liquid leakage sensors, and motor condition, undervoltage and phase, and insulation resistance monitoring devices.
All of the control and switching components in Omron Automation’s Value Design for Panel system are backed by more than 90 years of R&D experience and installed performance, and — according to an OMRON investigation in March 2023 — several of these components reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 50% compared with previous models (from 2016 and earlier) through a combination of power savings, resource savings, and reduced waste, including:
- Single-phase switch mode power supplies (SMPS), like the S8VK-G, which enables quick and easy installation, delivers high power density (15–480W) in a compact package that’s 13% smaller than comparable SMPS, ensures stable, reliable operation in harsh industrial environments exposed to high vibration and operating temperatures extending from -40°C to +70°C, and has a high mean time before failure (MTBF) for long-lifetime performance.
- Three-phase SMPS, including S8VK-WA models, which are engineered to maintain three-phase balance regardless of operating conditions — negating the need for load management, utilizes the world’s smallest class of compact body — requiring less than half the space of other Omron Automation SMPS and weighing approximately 35% less, and feature integrated maintenance and power supply indicators to help maximize uptime.
- The XW2K ultra-compact interface wiring system, which enables more compact control panels with greater functionality, is smaller than any other competing solution currently available on the market, and supports both horizontal and vertical mounting to maximize space efficiency.
- S8V-CP electronic DC circuit protectors, which reliably protect against short circuits and overcurrent, facilitate the sequential start-up of branch circuits to avoid errors, and feature four or eight branches in a single device — enabling significant space savings compared to four or eight conventional circuit breakers — and an alarm signal output to alert upstream controllers of abnormal operation.
- Digital temperature controllers with unique low-power-consumption displays.
- Motor protective relays and timers.
RS offers an extensive portfolio of Omron Automation products, including a comprehensive collection of panel building products. For more information about these Value Design for Panel products, check out the RS Expert Advice video podcast with Juan Carlos Garcia, Product Manager – Components at Omron Automation, the company’s Industrial Control Panel Component Selection Guide and panel building page, and the links embedded above.
For more expert insights from Omron Automation, check out the company’s other contributions to the RS Expert Advice series.
For more information, visit us.rs-online.com.
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