Powerlink - the open standard for the plastics industry

Fast reactions are essential for plastics processing, where response times below 0.5 milliseconds are required even for basic switching operations. Powerlink provides a lag-free infrastructure featuring communication cycles in the range of a few hundred microseconds, making it particularly suited for closed-loop control systems like these. Utilising cross-traffic, this real-time protocol is able to synchronise multiple axes with exceptional precision.

The world's fastest network to date has been implemented in a plastics application using Powerlink. This two-dimensional foil stretching machine from Brckner Maschinenbau GmbH & Co. KG features 728 axes synchronised with a cycle time of 400us. Performances like this make Powerlink a leading choice for the plastics industry.

As early as 2010, EUROMAP (the European association for plastics and rubber machinery manufacturers) had already incorporated the Powerlink standard in the EUROMAP 75 specification. Stefan Schnegger, managing director of the Ethernet POWERLINK Standardization Group, says: "The EUROMAP specification underscores Powerlink's leading position among protocols with hard real-time capabilities."

To learn more about Powerlink, please go to www.ethernet-powerlink.org.