PC-based control for e-mobility production

When it comes to manufacturing individualized products in a quantity-oriented and space-optimized manner, innovative production concepts are essential. These challenges can be solved efficiently with the XTS and XPlanar intelligent transport systems, as well as with the PC-based control technology from Beckhoff as a whole. Both of these transport systems are ideal for use in applications including electric motor production and battery manufacturing.

New impetus for e-mobility manufacturing

The automotive industry is currently undergoing a structural change that is set to take some time to complete, with digitalization, Industrie 4.0, automation, and networking all changing the face of production processes and plants. PC- and EtherCAT-based control technology from Beckhoff has always offered decisive competitive advantages for a sustainable, fast, and open-technology transformation of this future-oriented approach to plant automation. The use of industry and IT standards and components for cloud communication and big data make the PC-based control platform ideal for end-to-end networking and the implementation of Industrie 4.0 concepts.

The challenges and opportunities here are manifold and cover not only the vehicles themselves, but to a large extent also the production plants in the field of e-mobility. As Tilman Plaß, Industry Manager Automotive at Beckhoff, describes: “Our PC-based control technology represents the gold standard for universal and industry-independent control and automation solutions. For more than three decades, it has been used successfully around the world in all areas of industrial automation. The major upheaval in the automotive industry has meant that it now features more prominently in the production of electric motors, because as a flexible control technology with rapid cycle times of well under 1 ms it can handle more complicated control tasks at ever higher speeds while minimizing the machine footprint.” Tilman Plaß counts electric motor production as one of the many applications in which the use of Beckhoff technology proves beneficial: “The change in traction motors from wound coils to plugged hairpins is both changing and increasing the demands on production machines and even on control technology. Our PC-based control technology demonstrates here in numerous applications how even the most sophisticated hairpin assembly processes can be carried out quickly and synchronously.”