Press Release

Control technology from Beckhoff has successfully proven itself in use worldwide in wind turbines up to a size of 5 MW. Based on PC and EtherCAT technology, Beckhoff supplies universal control solutions for all areas of application in wind turbines, from pitch control and the operational management of tower and nacelle through to the farm networking and control room – both onshore and offshore.

The trade fair presentation at the Husum WindEnergy focuses on the fast EtherCAT communication system, which offers a large number of advantages to wind turbine manufacturers due to its high performance: through the integration of lower level fieldbuses, fieldbus masters can be relocated to the field for the control of subsystems without any additional CPUs being necessary.

EtherCAT enables the seamless integration of Condition Monitoring into the EtherCAT terminal system. TwinSAFE, Beckhoff’s safety technology, merges the safety functions into the existing controller application and thus replaces the hard-wired safety chain.

The Beckhoff I/O systems are supplemented by numerous new terminals, couplers and Embedded PCs. The certification of terminals for extreme climatic zones, from -20 to +60 °C, as well as the compact HD Bus Terminals with
16 connection points in a standard 12 mm housing, are at the centre of attention in the comprehensive Bus Terminal portfolio, whose 400 terminals cover the most diverse types of signals.

The new Embedded PCs from the CX5000 and CX8000 series are fanless, compact and energy-efficient PC-based controllers, which are ideally suited for control tasks in wind turbines.

For the first time at HusumWind, Beckhoff is presenting the new TwinCAT 3 software generation, with which the standard automation world is significantly extended. In addition to the object-oriented IEC 61131-3 extensions, the languages of the IT world are available in C and C++. Through the integration of Matlab®/Simulink® and Scada into the development environment, TwinCAT 3 offers a convenient tool for designing the control software. The modules are executable in the different languages in a common runtime under hard real-time conditions, using multi-core technology and with 32- or 64-bit operating systems.