Initially geared toward hygienic manufacturing in the life sciences market, the powerful FlexChassis® platform offers enormous potential for application in other industries. These include food and beverage, semiconductor, automotive, battery and e-mobility, e-commerce and more. Here, adaptive automation via the eXtended Transport System (XTS) from Beckhoff Automation is key, according to the experts at JR Automation.

Zhejiang Dafeng Industry is a leading solution provider from China serving the tourism and cultural sectors. When a branch for a national pavillion in Hangzhou was built, Dafeng was contracted to develop an intelligent folding wall system. With its greenish tile surface, the installation resembles a famous landscape painting. In the synchronized movement of the 251 walls weighing several tons each, PC- and EtherCAT-based control technology from Beckhoff ensures functional safety.

A perfect surface finish is the most obvious sign of a high-quality component. Achieving this consistently throughout series production is a challenge many manufacturers face, and this prompted Lesta srl, an Italian company, to develop its innovative painting robots. Flexibly automated with PC-based control from Beckhoff, these robots are suitable for use in a wide range of painting tasks, making a crucial contribution to optimizing the surface-finishing process.

Sustainability and efficiency are key issues that Beckhoff as a company and the PC- and EtherCAT-based New Automation Technology seek to tackle. Beckhoff Automation received the 2024 German Sustainability Award and offers a future-proof generation of motion control with TwinCAT MC3 as well as software and hardware solutions for efficient AI-supported engineering with TwinCAT Chat and the C6043 IPC. The AX8820 universal regenerative unit increases energy efficiency in production processes and also opens up opportunities for process optimization with extended diagnostics via EtherCAT. The MX-System for control cabinet-free automation taps into efficiency potential like no other, as the window profile processing machine from Schirmer impressively demonstrates. Other prime examples of successful implementation of PC-based control include battery production for electromobility, end-to-end process control in the plastics and packaging industry, and use in containerized biogas power plants.

PC-based control and drive technology from Beckhoff is, in many respects, an open and universal automation technology. This contributes majorly to the success of Beckhoff's technological developments, as exemplified by the interview on 20 years of EtherCAT in the motion environment and the technical article on integrating vision into TwinCAT Analytics. Beckhoff's incredibly diverse range of applications, both in terms of the target group, as evidenced by the implementation of PC-based control in the training area for the "New Engineering Education" teaching platform at Huazhong University, and for the IDEA box at Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences, also exemplifies this. Furthermore, numerous application sectors are described in this issue of PC Control with a Machine Tools special, including three packaging applications, reports on an autonomous diving waste collection robot for Venice's canals, and on construction machines for quarry work.

The PC Control issue on SPS 2023 highlights the ongoing innovation of the PC- and EtherCAT-based control technology from Beckhoff in various aspects. In an interview with the Open Automation editorial team, Managing Owner Hans Beckhoff explains not only the company’s development and philosophy, but also the numerous innovations in the spotlight at this ‘Automation Olympics’ in Nuremberg. Two further interviews delve into the Beckhoff exhibition highlights, MX-System and TwinCAT Chat. At the core of PC-based control is the EtherCAT technology introduced by Beckhoff 20 years ago, whose success story is also described from various perspectives in two interviews. The cover story of this issue showcases that the success of EtherCAT cannot be rated ‘highly’ enough – after all, it even reaches into space with the help of Isar Aerospace! That said, it can also be quite ‘down to earth’, as demonstrated by the use of the EL3182 EtherCAT HART Terminals to implement the new NAMUR Open Architecture (NOA) for the chemical giant Bayer.