Academic and Research Laboratory of Siemens Industrial Automation Systems and Electric Drives

The laboratory was established at the Department of Automatic Control Systems in 2007 with the support of Siemens, which is interested in increasing the number of qualified engineers who have been trained to work with the company’s equipment.

The laboratory is designed for 24 (up to 36) workplaces, it has 24 educational stands. Each stand is a flexible system and can be used in parts, as a whole, or in interaction with each other.

The stand, which is based on LOGO! and S7-200 controllers, can be considered the basis for an initial level of understanding of the concept of industrial automation in general (taking into consideration the features of Siemens equipment). These controllers, having a low cost, provide quite a wide range of opportunities for solving simple industrial problems.

The stand ‘Automation system for electromechanical objects and technological processes’ provides an opportunity to study the most common Siemens controller, S7-300. The stand has a configuration that includes digital and analog inputs and outputs, as well as Profibus and Industrial Ethernet interfaces.

Also, there is a touch panel on the stand, it is an information input and display device. The panel can be linked to the controller to enter values ​​for various parameters and display the status of inputs in a graphical representation. The third component of the stand is an AC drive based on the Micromaster440 frequency converter, the most functional of the standard Siemens frequency converters. The structure of the electric drive includes an asynchronous electric motor with a power of 180 W with a pulse sensor. The electric drive can be used not only as an object of study but also as a simulator of process equipment managed by the controller. The stand allows one to fully master the standard PLC programming languages, explore the possibilities of device interaction over industrial networks, and gain skills in working with human-machine interface systems and SCADA systems.

The stand ‘Multi-drive motion control system,’ a training case, is designed to study the Sinamics S120 electric drive system based on the Simotion controller. Simotion controllers have been specially developed for such applications that require complex, fast, and precise movements as well as program logic control of numerous peripheral devices. The functions of Motion Control, the functionality of an industrial controller, and additional technological functions are combined in one device. The stand includes two synchronous servomotors with position sensors. Special software makes it possible to synthesize an electric drive system with specified quality indicators, take characteristics of the resulting system, set complex motion trajectories, and synchronize the axes of a technological object properly.