Out of the switch cabinet

Due to the tight supply situation, bdtronic was looking for new positioning drives for its dosing machines. The machine builders found what they were looking for at AMKmotion: the new, decentralised and compact drive solution made by the specialists in Kirchheim unter Teck works very precisely, saves space in the control cabinet, simplifies installation – and offers reliable availability.

bdtronic is a global mechanical engineering company for 1C and 2C dosing technology, plasma pre-treatment, hot caulking and impregnation technology for electric drives. In addition to its headquarters in Weikersheim, in the north-east of Baden-Württemberg, the provider of comprehensive process solutions operates two further production sites in Italy and the USA, along with seven service and sales subsidiaries in Europe, Asia and North America.

bdtronic employs a total of more than 480 people around the globe. Its systems are supplied to customers in the automotive industry and the electrical and electronics sector, as well as in medical technology and the pharmaceutical industry. bdtronic’s technologies are particularly important in the production of electric and hybrid motors, batteries and the power electronics in modern vehicles: in addition to tier 1 and tier 2 companies, bdtronic also supplies numerous OEM customers worldwide.

bdtronic was looking for a new compact drive solution for its dosing machines. At the end of 2021, there were long delays in component deliveries and the supply was no longer secure. “We consistently focus on optimisation, both in our systems and in our processes,” says Andreas Olkus, Head of the Dosing and Plasma Business Unit at bdtronic. As a result, the company decided to look for another partner able to offer new solutions for the drives, so it contacted AMKmotion. “We’ve known AMKmotion and its products for a very long time and have worked together successfully on various occasions, too. That’s why we went knocking on the door in Kirchheim,” says Olkus.

“To be specific, it was a matter of equipping dosing machines with precise positioning drives for the horizontal and vertical axes, keeping the space requirement in the control cabinet as low as possible and supplying bdtronic with all components reliably and promptly,” says Konrad Beier, sales engineer with AMKmotion. He was responsible for the bdtronic project. “We had a think about it and, in addition to conventional planning, i.e. with the drive electronics in the control cabinet, we also suggested another elegant option to bdtronic – a decentralised solution in which the drive technology is located along with all the control units directly in the machine and is connected as on a daisy-chain basis.”

The package consists of the decentralised servo converter iC5, which combines feed and servo inverter on the surface of half an A4 sheet. The feed supplies a continuous output of five kilowatts and ten kilowatts at peak to generate the direct current (DC) bus. In addition, there are three or four iX5 decentralised servo inverters with IP65 protection for connection to the DC bus and real-time Ethernet communication. Depending on the system design, four or five convection-cooled synchronous servo motors of the DT4-1 and DT4-2 series move the X, Y1, Y2 and Z axes. The motors with single-turn encoders offer high torque and power density as well as very high dynamics, with acceleration of up to 100,000 rad/s². “Our decentralised variant offers the user numerous advantages,” Beier explains, and he lists them: “Drive components in the control cabinet are no longer required, the cabling is very straight forward thanks to the daisy chain, installation is much faster, the energy exchange via the DC bus increases the energy efficiency of the entire system, the solution runs reliably and it is durable. On top of that, since we use standard components, there are no additional costs for application-specific adaptations and we are able to deliver at short notice.” Another big plus: with the combination proposed by AMKmotion, safety functions such as Safe Limited Speed (SLS) are now also possible simply as FSoE (Fail-Safe over EtherCAT).

The decentralised concept impressed Andreas Olkus’ team and the project quickly got off the ground. “The proposal met our specifications exactly, and the quick availability was excellent,” says Andreas Kubera, who works in electrical design at bdtronic. “This allowed us to plan more compactly, the cabling was simpler so it required less effort, and we didn’t need additional air conditioning units in the control cabinet.” After the first tests on the prototype in November 2021, the technicians paid a visit and a test run was carried out at bdtronic’s premises. “We were surprised how quickly and easily we were able to integrate the component into the existing designs,” says Kubera. And so it was that in November AMKmotion already received an order for the first 250 drives – which the company was able to deliver on schedule, too. A second large order followed as early as May 2022.

Kubera was pleasantly surprised by the short implementation time: “It usually takes six months for a drive train like this to run stably. With AMKmotion we managed to get the whole thing up and running in just four weeks.” In addition to the elegant technical solution, other key factors on this project included close and cooperative collaboration and the open communication. “It really was a lot of fun and we can rely on the solution,” says Andreas Olkus in summary. “We’ve now fitted quite a number of systems with the new solution and we’re getting nothing but positive feedback.”