Tightening System

Industrial tightening systems are used for the assembly of manifold parts, for example in automated car production, in valves, in pumps or in generators. The challenge for the electronics lies in the precise and error-free handling of all units. It must be extremely reliable to prevent malfunction during the production process which would otherwise cause high downtime costs.

The tightening system controls and monitors the tightening process, performs the system diagnosis and monitor all individual components of a tightening channel. As this application requires a high degree of modularity, the control of the tightening stations which can have as many as 40 tightening channels is realized based on modular 19" systems down to small system boxes that can also be connected among each other.

The computing core both for the 19" racks and for the small boxes is always the same and based on Computer-On-Module technology. The customized COM is featuring a PowerPC® MPC 5200 processor supporting the CAN bus, Ethernet, USB and UART interfaces from the CPU. Additional CAN bus, ArcNet and Anybus® fieldbus interfaces are implemented as IP cores in the on-board FPGA. The COM carrier cards are tailored to fit into the 19" or the box system.