Mitsubishi Electric, a leading pioneer in indigenous PLC in India, has constantly innovated to achieve globalstandards in designing and manufacturing PLC products. With pride, it has now launched a high performance series of world class CPUs viz. Nexgen 5000; coupled with basic building blocks of its earlier launched and established Nexgen 4000 PLC. This Nexgen 5000 PLC family offers a wide range of CPU variants, with IEC 61131-3 compatibility, having performance excellence and Windows based programming software.
Evolution Of PLCs on IEC 61131-3 Platform
In the earlier days of industrial automation, application specific machines or process plants were designed with huge control panels having Relay Contactor Logic and Hardware Timers, Counters, Thumbwheels. These were very bulky in size, complex for fault finding, less reliable with limited and unpredictable life.
Similarly these systems were very rigid in terms of any up-gradation. This has evolved concept of Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) which were compact in size, having better edge over earlier electro-mechanical devices. PLC implementation has resulted in several benefits like: minimized panel and wiring volume, expedited program development, reliability of operations with an improved life, PLC re-usability across the applications (conditionally), easy and quick fault finding, and ease of interface with HMIs,SCADAlike external devices. Over the time, only application specific hardware and software products were developed by various vendors, which addressed the problem of compatibility and portability. This has initiated necessity of products standardization in terms of hardware as well as software.
Subsequently, International Electro-technical Commission worked upon complete design of PLC, which comprised of hardware design, installation, testing, programming and documentation. Several inputs from various machine manufacturers, end-users and research institutes has evolved five part IEC 61131 standard.
This international standard IEC 61131-3 is the first substantial endeavor to standardize programming languages for industrial automation. It emphasizes on consistent method of PLC programming which encourages the development of quality software. IEC 61131-3 provides tools to improve intrinsic quality of software in terms of its persistent correctness, integrity, reliability, robustness, modularity, flexibility and safety. It also deals with programming, installation and maintenance phases of software development projects in industrial control. Similarly, with the growing Industrial Automation, industry has started facing typical problems of PLC processing speed, memory, handling of a complex or very big program, logic re-usability, avoiding duplicate variables in programming, choice of programming language selection as per application, user friendly software along with documentation, standardized program interface.
IEC 61131-3 compatible programming yields Rapid Application Development.
Nexgen 5000 series of CPU family is programmed with CoDeSys, the Windows based, IEC 61131-3 compatible programming software.
NEXGEN 5000 PLC : AN ICON OF THE FUTURE
- A truly modular PLC
- More I/O Capacity - 1024 Inputs / 1024 Outputs
- Enhanced Data Memory - 160 KB
- 64 KB - Data Memory (Selectively retainable)
- 32 KB - Marker Memory (Selectively retainable)
- 64 KB - File Marker Memory (Super retainable)
- Better processing speed - Boolean - 0.4 sec
Word - 1.2 sec
Application Program Code - 256 KB
Application Source Code - 1 MB
- Wide assortment of Analog modules - Thermocouple,
- RTD, Fast Analog Input and Output Modules
IMPROVED PG PORT OPERATION
- Supports RS-232C interface
- Dual operation - Program mode or Open Protocol
- Auto detect programming cable plug in & switch
- to program mode
- User memory cassette interface
- Supports all protocol FBs
ENHANCED FILE MARKER MEMORY
- Super retained battery backed up memory
- Not cleared by cold start or even after program change
- Large capacity of 64K bytes
PLUGGABLE KEYBOARD DISPLAY UNIT
The Keyboard Display interface is a extremely user & maintenance friendly tool, which provides 4-character alpha-numeric display with 6 keys key-pad.
Highlights :
- User has an optional choice of pluggable keyboard display
- It has built-in freely programmable 6 functions keys &
- 4 character alphanumeric display
- The keyboard display can be used as a self diagnostic tool.
This is helpful for assistance in :
Displaying fault messages
Displaying systems messages
Viewing / modifying PLC variables
Redirection of Digital I/O points
- The display and keyboard are freely programmable for application specific functionality. Display and keyboard is accessible in the application program through the system variables. Using these system variables, the user can develop their own function blocks to handle display and keypad as per the application need
- Standard FB library for I/O/M Monitoring, Redirection of Digital I/O points are also available.
- The Keyboard Display Unit can be fixed to / removed from, the Processor module during the module powered ON condition
