Design Focus: Industrial Safety Curtain

The optoelectronic safety system provides contact-free personal protection whilst in dangerous areas of industrial manufacturing. This self contained light curtain requires no external control unit. When the protective field is interrupted, hazardous machine motion is signalled to stop. When the field is cleared and the safety system reset, machine motion is enabled to resume.

As the first completely solid state light grid array, this product captured significant worldwide market presence as a low cost, high reliability, flexible alternative to mechanical safety guards.  Light grid array ensures worker safety and increases productivity. The small size saves valuable industrial space.

Time to Market

Plexus greatly exceeded customer expectations by bringing this industrial system from concept to manufacturing in 18 months (including development, verification, agency approval and configuration of manufacturing cell). As a result, the product captured significant world-wide market share. As the first industrial safety product approved under EN50100, Plexus helped to set the standard by which future products would be assessed. In addition, Plexus pioneered a documentation and review procedure with the
customer and the TÜV for product approval.

Total Cost Advantage

Plexus improved the existing product by reducing the unit cost by 75%. As a result, the product was well received in the marketplace and payback on the development NRE was realized within 6 months of launch.

Flexibility

By playing an active role in the front-end Quality Function Deployment (QFD) process, Plexus engineers were able to map required functions to design implementation. As a result, the development phase could start earlier with good direction provided by the  QFD output.

Plexus Services Provided

Project Management
Digital Design
Analog Design
Embedded Software Design
Mechanical Design
Industrial Design
Printed Circuit Board Design
Prototype Build
Product Qualification
Regulatory Compliance
Functional Test Design and Build
In-Circuit Test Design and Build
Volume Manufacturing

Full details on the technical capabilities involved in this project are available on request. For further inforamtion, please contact kirsty.brown@plexus.com.