Condition Monitoring with DSC Sensors

New Balluff solution reduces Total Cost of Ownership

Balluff: Proactive maintenance offers enormous potential for cost savings. Equipment and machines having this feature provide significant competitive advantages. Reliable function diagnostics is especially important in high-dynamic machines, used for example in the printing and paper industry and in cigarette manufacturing. With their Dynamic Sensor Control (DSC), sensor specialist and networking provider Balluff offers a completely new and cost-effective way to detect quality deviations in the manufacturing process in real time indirectly through the sensors. Here Balluff boasts not only a complete portfolio of inductive, capacitive and photoelectric sensors, but also the matching full range of connectivity and networking products.

With Dynamic Sensor Control the value of a machine design can be significantly increased, since the user profits from greater up-time, simpler startup and more efficient maintenance. This is made possible through DSC-compatible sensors, a special Balluff version of already proven standard binary sensors which can output not only the switching and an error signal, but also warning and trend messages. The increasing contamination of a photoelectric sensor, wandering of a target in the direction of the inductive sensor and much more, which indicates a status change in the machines, can be reported in realtime to the controller. The icing on the cake: A simple 3-conductor standard cable is all that is needed to connect and send the switching signals, error messages and warning, because the dynamic information is modulated over the standard binary signal. Multiconductor cables are never needed. In addition, the sensors are even much less expensive than so-called “intelligent sensors” with similar functionality.

All that is required is a connection to a DSC sensor hub. This collects and condenses the information from up to eight DSC ports to one IOLink port on the Master, which passes the signals on to the controller over the field bus.

DSC sensors with their warning and trend messages offer users not only greater added value compared with standard binary sensors, they are also a cost-effective way to fill the gap that used to exist between Desina sensors with their error message and the configurable and diagnostics-capable IO-Link sensors.