The new standard in electronic circuit breakers…

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Written by Mark Lloyd, Senior Product Manager- Power Supplies & Surge Protection

A major industry trend I have seen over recent years is the increasing use of dedicated circuit breakers for device protection, as opposed to the long-established circuit breakers such as MCB and MCCBs used to protect complete installations. Within the device circuit breaker offering the electronic circuit breaker is emerging as the dominant. In my time with Phoenix Contact we have released a number of new electronic circuit breakers including fixed or configurable single and multi-channel devices with a host of different features to suit whatever applications are thrown at us.  

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Phoenix Contact loves to test its own products

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Written by Gareth Chamberlain, Product Manager- Cyber Security & IT Automation

Last year we set a goal of self-reflection and a task to get to know our products more. Sure, reading a manual can really give insight into how it works and what it does, but they do not explain the little details of a product that might be interesting as a feature, or as a little undocumented step.

One product I chose to work on was the Radioline– can we setup a point to point network that is a little more extreme then just a flat area with two points? We have done tests before for customers, but never 400m up and broadcasting into the beautiful city of Shrewsbury.



So, I recruited two of my colleagues Andy Neat and Matt Lee. The Dynamic duo would travel to Shrewsbury in search of a place to setup and broadcast from their side. While Darren Hack and I would climb the Wrekin to setup the Radioline master. Take a look at the results in the video below.

Radioline is a radio transceiver solution allowing point to point, star and mesh networks to be built. This then can broadcast the following I/O types

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‘T-Bus’ adapter for bridging the Pepperl and Fuchs ‘K power rail system’

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Written by Fraser Cowie, Product Manager- Interface

This innovative adapter allows the use of other Signal Conditioners, also known as Isolation Amplifiers, on to the K Power Rail System of Pepperl & Fuchs. Replacement of existing P & F products, which are installed on the Power Rail system, by a Phoenix Contact equivalent product will be possible, without any changes in the installation.

The new ‘T-Bus adapter’ is suitable for the following signal conditioner ranges from Phoenix Contact: MACX Analog, MACX Analog EX, MINI Analog, as well as the popular MINI Analogue Pro.

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Renewable energy storage

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Written by Gary Nelson, Senior Product Manager- Device Connections

When you think about energy storage what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

I would guess that your first thought will be about batteries as we are all familiar with what they do for us in our everyday lives whether for our TV remote controls, smoke detectors or re-chargeable devices. I suspect, however, that none of us ever expected to see them being used to supply us with power for our cars and electricity for our homes.

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Feel the power

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Written my Mark Lloyd, Senior Product Manager- Power Supplies & Surge Protection

The 1st Standard DIN RAIL power supply with 110 VDC output.

Up until now, the highest output we could achieve with one PSU was 56VDC using a 48DC power supply turned up to its maximum voltage. In order to achieve the higher voltages for which we are regularly asked, it was only possible with two wired in series. For example two series connected 48DC nominal power supplies individually “tweaked” up to 55DC.   

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Supercharge your milk float!

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Written by Nigel Dawbarn, Sales & Marketing Manager – Industry Management and E-Mobility

The world is a fast paced place, with so much available on demand we are no longer used to waiting! And with time being money we cannot afford to be waiting for hours for our vehicles to charge to carry on our journeys or deliveries.

Phoenix Contact has recently launched the Universal Inlet for use in passenger cars but also for many commercial and industrial vehicles. Imagine road sweepers, refuse trucks, buses larger trucks and delivery vans (and don’t forget the motorcycle!) all being available in electric form in the coming years, our air quality will see a massive improvement when these vehicles are being used in our towns and cities. But how can we reduce the time needed to charge these vehicles?

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Retrofitting terminals

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Written by Scott Mulholland, Product Manager- Industrial Components

Screw terminal side entry
Traditional push in ‘PT’ terminal top entry

In retrofit activity, its very easy to incur material costs and labour charges that can ramp up alarmingly from initial estimations. Replacing the terminals and conductors in a busy cabinet, junction box or machine could prove a serious undertaking. Therefore, replacing your traditional screw terminals with a more modern spring based push in terminal might be an initially attractive proposition.  It then it dawns on you that the benefits of speed of installation, vibration proof etc that come with fitting a push in ‘PT’ terminal may be negated by the need to replace each individual conductor/wire to achieve the extra wire length (say 40mm for arguments sake) to be able ‘loop’ over into the top of the terminal. You would need to do this as ‘PT’ push in terminals are top entry, whereas screw terminals are side entry. This could be very costly both in time and cash.

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How safe is your speed?

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Written by Andy Maskell, Product Manager- Safety & Networks

Safe motion monitoring has become increasingly important in machine and system design. Conventional safety technology keeps the operator away from dangerous movement by shutting down the relevant drive when a moveable guard, e.g. safety door, is opened. This usually results in the removal of power sources using contactors or other forms of power disconnection. “Safe Switch Off”.

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Is your job a pain in the wrist?

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Written by Andy Neat, Senior Product Manager- Marking & Identification and Toolfox

Morning and welcome to another Monday morning blog from myself! I hope you and your families are all safe and well and let’s hope for a return to normality very soon!

I’m going to jump straight in with this one…being the Product Manager for our tool range I find that nine times out of ten, when I’m being asked to go and show tools to engineers, it’s to help with time saving and consequently cost saving (or just because the engineers want new toys). However, that one time out of ten is for a far more interesting point, it’s to reduce RSI.

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How can you make an old building smart?

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Written by Deepan Patel, Industry Manager- Infrastructure

New features alert!

With Niagara 4.9 recently released, I have some new innovative features that are now available from our Infrastructure solutions to share with you. Don’t take these solutions only for Building Automation projects, we can do so much more with Niagara such as Email/SMS alerts, Data Logging, HTML5 autogenerated pages, visualisation engine, etc. Speak to me today and I can explain how!

  1. Our ILC 2050 controller now offers via its Shell environment, the ability to create IP Static Routes. For those networking experts this reduces the requirement of a Layer 3 switch. Now that’s a game changer!

2. Improved CPU load performance with the latest firmware release.

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