Market-oriented 1
Safety by Harald klieber Kübler ranks among the four largest position and motion sensors manufacturers. Besides the field bus and slip ring technology, Technical Manager Gebhard Kübler now also emphasizes Functional Safety: In terms of safety, certified components are not sufficient any more. This is why we are presenting at the SPS IPC Drives fair an efficient global package with a business area specifically created for this purpose, unique innovations and our first Product Manager for Functional Safety. Gebhard Kübler considers that Kübler launched the first safe encoder on the market already 2008. With our new business area Functional Safety, we are sending a signal showing the relevance of this issue. Typical for Kübler, our main focus is set on customer-orientation and on safe motion. We want to make the axes safer. Our experts have the required know-how and we have already the necessary innovations to achieve this goal. However, marketing these innovations is often quite difficult, so Gebhard Kübler s arguments for the new business area and the necessary 1 Kübler enhances its portfolio from one axis to two axes with new variants of its logic control Safety-M including extensions for digital outputs and relay outputs. Pictures: Klieber and decisive promotion of this technology. To that purpose, Kübler offers its Functional Safety as a system almost from one single source. Functional Safety plus explosion protection At Kübler, the customer has only one contact person. Our technology combines our encoders with our safety modules. All this results in an efficient global package for Functional Safety including the wiring and software stresses Kübler s first Product Manager for Functional Safety, Jonas Urlaub. This excludes problems with interfaces. Furthermore, the company already masters all customer interfaces and standard protocols. Regarding the mechanical interfaces, Kübler offers a certified mounting. The customer can create his optimal solution choosing among nine encoders of the Safety family and 13 safety modules. But this is not as trivial as it looks, since encoders and inclinometers are highly
complex components. It must be noted here that not any control is able to read encoders, since people underestimate the complexity of processing encoder data. Kübler can do it. We have the encoders with all required interfaces up to SIL3 and PL e. And we extended this range once again and linked Functional Safety with explosion protection, explains Jonas Urlaub. This results for example in the new Ex-approved FS encoders. The Position und Motion Sensors area is growing Kübler s business area Position and Motion Sensors is not only growing with new standard and Heavy-Duty-encoders and hollowshaft encoders. Kübler also includes in this area all magnetic linear measuring systems, draw-wire systems and inclinometers, as well as integrated compact drives with a power class up to about 450 Watt. Kübler also extends its application engineering for technology-intensive products such as field busses, Safety and slip rings. The brothers Gebhard and Lothar Kübler, who are running the Company since 1995, also want to give further signals expanding the head offices of the Company in Villingen- Schwenningen. We recently expanded our product creation department with a large building expansion. We even complemented our production with 3 modules. In any case, the sensor naturally remains the core of our business, which will allow us to reach our planned turnover of about 50 million Euros until the end of this year however, due to the stagnating wind power plant business in China, probably only with a slight plus with respect to the previous year summarises Manager Lothar Kübler. The company is all the same well prepared and optimistic for 2013. In spite of the expected slowdown in economic activity, we want to grow significantly again. In 2012, the workforce of the Group reached 400 persons worldwide. The export share represents about 70%. The managers underline that independence, that is to say remaining a family-owned company, is the highest of all values of the company. www.kuebler.com 2 2 Safety as a new business area: Manager Lothar Kübler (in the centre) wants to go on growing in spite of the expected slowdown in the global economy. Until 2020, the company should manage to increase its turnover from about 50 to 100 million Euros resorting to new technologies and relying on (from left to right) Safety Manager Jonas Urlaub, Branch Manager Markus Brunner, Sensor technology expert Arnold Hettich and Marketing strategist Pierre Brucker. 3 Sendix Heavy Duty H120 for the wind energy: this new hollow-shaft encoder supplements the products range in line with the requirements of generator speed measurement in wind power plants. The H120 withstands also high bearing loads and equalizing bearing currents. Pictures: Klieber Sensors expert Arnold Hettich presented new solutions for the steel industry, the wind power plants and maritime crane installations: We have many years of experience in such heavy-duty applications, and we offer the suitable products. Failures are not only expansive in the chemical industry. Our encoders such as the H02H or the 5868 are ideally prepared for heat, cold, humidity, vibrations, dust, shocks. Arnold Hettich stresses Kübler s present customer-oriented development with the example of the new hollowshaft encoder H120. He highlights the unique features of the new hollowshaft family based on the Sendix H100 that was presented at the SPS 2010: This is the robust solution, the incremental encoder with cable or connector for use on large shafts up to a diameter of 28 mm and with overall dimensions that do not exceed a diameter of about 100 mm. Only Kübler offers this. From the design point of view, Arnold Hettich recommends the H120 particularly for the radial shaft seals with cover disk mounted on both sides, which offer optimal protection against dirt and damages. He describes the design of the HD-Safety-Lock bearing protection: This ensures you double reliability, longer service life, no unplanned standstills and our new bearing isolation up to 2.5 kv prevents shaft currents from flowing to the housing through the bearings in spite of a massive metal to metal connection. 3
Also the very large ball bearings and bearing span, which Kübler nevertheless managed to interlock mechanically, ensure best vibration resistance. With this arrangement the forces can be absorbed very effectively. There is no damage to the bearings promises Arnold Hettich. Intelligent monitoring solutions from one single source According to the experience of Markus Brunner, Branch Manager for Wind, Steel and Mobile Automation, the use of the new Safety- M modules allow saving many components. So their safe digital and analogue inputs could for example monitor all safety-relevant measurements of a wind power plant. This includes the following tasks: cable twist, tower oscillation, emergency stop button, wind direction, up to the locking and monitoring of the service hatch. Considering the increasing costs pressure, especially in the wind power plants branch, this universality and flexibility is indispensable, since the requirements for the components also increased massively reports Markus Brunner. Encoders only represent about 1% of the investment in a wind power plant, but they must become about 20 to 30% cheaper in the future. This is due to Chinese competitors, who are imposing this price spiral. We develop our solution approaches mainly using Lean Design and Design to Cost, on the one hand in order to optimise the Gebhard Kübler: A proof of Kübler s high market acceptance is the fact that many customers simply say Sendix when they talk about the encoder. We did not reach totally the same point with our Limes measuring systems yet. Kübler at the SPS fair in Hall 7A-508. material and expenses required and, on the other hand, to develop and design according to costs considerations. This leads, according to Markus Brunner, to Kübler s intelligent solutions, such as the Safety-M control, that first has the function of an operational control and only acts as a safety control if necessary. On the bottom line, we offer our customers, with the complete safety control, a major plus because we are able offer already today for example the step to the slightly more expansive and complex, but safe, wind power plant from one source promises Markus Brunner. Innovative components are already available for that purpose: the hollowshaft encoder H120 or the new multiturn encoders Sendix F58 with integrated resolver and F36 with its compact design are predestined for the gear limit switches of pitch and azimuth drives.