Uplifting solution: Airplane maker won over by multivoltage input

"Our customers entrust us with technical and maintenance projects relating to their plants, with huge costs riding on reliable and time efficient fulfillment. We rely on effective partners like Weidmüller, who stand at our side with their expertise and vision. This helps us to concentrate completely on our core competencies, and do justice to the huge responsibility we have towards our customers," says Gerardo Medugno from the Italian system integrator Simav.

"Our portfolio covers the integration of a variety of systems for a wide bandwidth of industrial production plant types. One question that we always have to ask ourselves is, 'which field voltages do we have to work with?' With existing plants, we must in theory test the entire sensor system, sensorby-sensor, to determine which components we should select for processing the voltages. Thanks to Weidmüller we now have a more efficient solution at hand."

With the TERMSERIES relay modules and TERMSERIES solid-state relays, Weidmüller offers a solution which processes all the differing or changing input voltages from a field in only one product by means of its unique multivoltage input. In the context of a major project for the airplane maker Alenia Aermacchi, Simav was completely won over by Weidmüller's sustainable product solution.

Alenia Aermacchi can look back over almost a century of company history in airplane manufacture and today, is one of the leading companies in the world aerospace industry. The company's product portfolio consists of civil and military aircraft, training aircraft for all phases of pilot training and complex systems for these aircraft types.

The production facility at Naples is specialised in the manufacture of advanced airframe structures for civil aircraft, for example the Airbus A380. Ten cranes are used in the civil aircraft division at Naples, whose control cabinets have been refurbished to the state of the art by Simav.

"As with all our projects, at Alenia Aermacchi the time factor was crucial, as the refurbishment of plant automation always means that the plant has to be shut down for a while," says Medugno. "We were all the more pleased when Weidmüller was able to offer us an immediately usable product in the form of the TERMSERIES."

Formerly Simav used relays that were connected to the coil-in series with a dropping resistor. This resulted in the relay heating up during operation, which meant more extensive problems with maintenance.

"We discussed this problem with our Weidmüller key account manager on site. Pasquale Russo aided us in analysing the requirements and shortly afterwards was able to present us with a solution, which straight away gave us a feeling of assurance: the TERMSERIES relay module," recalls Medugno.

A multivoltage input in the narrow serial terminal design as offered by Weidmüller is currently unique. In only one version, it processes Simav signals from 24 V to 230 V DC and AC. Simav has therefore been able to significantly reduce its inventory costs.

During maintenance, technicians benefit from the plug-in design of the relay modules making the modules easy to replace – without time-consuming removal of wiring.

"In addition to the especially compact design, we also really liked the LED status indicator, which illuminates the entire ejector surface," commented Medugno in relation to the features of the relay module. "The multivoltage input means that we always have the right spare part at hand without having to store various versions. We thus no longer waste time in this way in our projects. The implementation of a multivoltage input in such a compact housing is what makes the TERMSERIES such a unique solution for us."