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Customer application

Playing It Safe with the Power Supply

For supplying power to manufacturing systems, safety plays a large role. In low-voltage main distribution boards, circuit breakers are typically used to safely prevent excess currents and switch off the power supply in the case of a short circuit. Therefore, monitoring systems is particularly important to enable fast re-establishment of the power supply in the event of an interruption. Schaeffler, an industrial and automotive supplier, therefore uses fieldbus couplers from WAGO in their roller bearing production at their Schweinfurt, Germany facility.
During the production of roller bearings, a large number of different machines are used for cold-shaping technology, forging, machining, heat treatment and coating technology. The company processes around 80,000 metric tons of steel annually at their Schweinfurt facility into roller bearing products for various uses – from automobile construction to wind power plants. A reliable power supply in diverse systems therefore represents the most important infrastructural foundation for Schaeffler.

Protection with Fieldbus Couplers from WAGO

  • Power Supply for Machines
  • Remote Monitoring of the Circuit Breakers
  • Alerts – Detailed and around the Clock
  • Easy Retrofitting and Potential Expansion
WAGO I/O-Systems

Power Supply for Machines

There are multiple supply lines from the medium-voltage network on the Schweinfurt facility grounds. They supply the transformer substation, which has just under 100 transformers, and these in turn supply around 30 low-voltage main distribution boards, which provide the power to the facility’s manufacturing machines. “Power supply safety and reliability is particularly important to us,” explains Julian Kübler, who is responsible for monitoring the medium- and low-voltage transformers at the Schaeffler factory in Schweinfurt. Circuit breakers separately isolate the outputs for the electrical loads in the systems. Each circuit breaker is accommodated in a control cabinet in its own array. For loads with lower power, several small circuit breakers are sometimes mounted in an array. A typical system consists of two to three regions with 15–20 arrays with a total output of up to 2,000 kVA.