HARTING Canada and the main benefits of smart industrial connectivity

Smart connectivity is the way of the future.

The next generation of connectors: this is one of the missions of HARTING Canada, backed by 75 years of industry expertise. One key trend in which the company has immersed itself is smart industrial connectivity. Older connectors could not work with power, signal, data, air, and other media, so they let anything that entered them pass through between points. Smart connectivity allows units to take action on the media as it passes.

The two key questions

There are two key questions about smart connectivity that users must explore: Why these technologies are necessary for modern applications; and why the connector is ideal for integrating these technologies. The first answer is that these technologies prevent downtime, boost efficiency, and improve reliability. The modern world runs on machines, turbines, trains, and other industrial devices, but they are complex, and shutdowns result from small issues. Monitoring energy levels and preventing spikes keep systems running under non-ideal conditions.

These modern applications rely on smart industrial connectivity, which offers insight into the health of these devices. The surge-protection module ensures proper readings from sensors in wind turbines and HVAC systems, for example; preventing misreadings due to voltage spikes is vital to ensuring that these applications run optimally.

The second answer is that smart functionality in connectors is the most secure and easiest location for integration. There are a couple of potential locations to consider when adding these technologies, but connectors are the best place.

Without smart industrial connectivity, it is possible for an industrial device to prevent a large voltage spike with surge-protection technology on the board of the PLC, but it is far riskier and harder. Industrial connectors provide flexibility in the levels of protection they offer. Adding a smart module to a connector allows the module to have the same environmental rating as the connector hood, like IP 65/7/8/9K, for example.

Implementing these technologies, like surge protection and energy measurement, into existing designs is easy with HARTING’s Han-Smart connector series. Although a new design phase was required before, Han-Smart enables adding these features onto the existing connector footprint.

For more information, contact HARTING.

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