POWERLINK demonstrates its true strength when it comes to the growing number of electronically controlled drives, which in turn are required to exchange an ever-increasing amount of data. The fact that POWERLINK has recently established a new world record in the number of synchronised drives proves it. The gearless drives of a new sequential foil stretching machine from the German manufacturer Brückner Maschinenbau GmbH & Co. KG require rigid synchronisation. The machine features 384 modules with two drives each, with complete synchronisation of the 728 servo drives handled by POWERLINK with a 400µs cycle time and jitter below 1µs.
POWERLINK is an Ethernet-based industrial field network system originally developed by B&R, an Austria-based supplier of industrial automation systems. Standard-compliant Ethernet frames, complete software solutions and the unique addressing system provide the open source POWERLINK field network with the flexibility required to handle multi-purpose applications in strictly synchronous real-time systems. This allows the full range of functions to be used in parallel during operation without any reciprocal limitations.
Over 500,000 POWERLINK systems have been installed since its launch in 2001, and as one of the only real-time industrial Ethernet systems on the market, POWERLINK is not only able to claim system wide synchronicity in large plants it can also prove it.
