Getting companies fit for Industry 4.0 involves a lot of tweaking and adjustments! Nowadays, mechanical engineers are expected to offer highly flexible solutions with minimal changeover times for automatically creating new formats at speed. The positioning systems required to achieve this need to be both reliable and tailored precisely to fit the application. State-of-the-art positioning systems use integrated condition monitoring to ensure optimum machine availability. These requirements led halstrup-walcher GmbH to equip its PSD direct drives with a stepping motor and all the relevant subsystems such as control, bus interface and incremental or absolute measuring system. These compact drives achieve speeds of up to 1,500 RPM, which makes them the perfect choice wherever machine axes need frequent adjustment to handle small batches.

At HANNOVER MESSE 2018, halstrup-walcher is unveiling CANopen and IO-Link extensions for its PSD series of products. If customers require, they can also be controlled via PROFIBUS DP, DeviceNet, Modbus RTU, Sercos, EtherCAT, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP or POWERLINK bus systems. This equips the PSD direct drives with the same selection of bus systems as the company's PSE 3-series positioning systems. halstrup-walcher is providing all the fine detail at the launch event during HANNOVER MESSE in April.