Industrial Factory Automation

Wilcoxon Research has announced an additional intrinsically safe certification in accordance with IECEx requirements for six general-purpose accelerometers. The six accelerometers were approved for use in Class I Zone 0 hazardous areas. Tom Smith, vice-president of sales and marketing, said: 'These vibration sensors were previously approved as intrinsically safe by certifying agencies recognised in the US, Canada and Europe. 'Condition monitoring is growing in popularity across the world and the IECEx certification will help us better serve customers in other regions,' he added. Six general-purpose accelerometers, with a sensitivity of 100mV/g and a +5 per cent sensitivity tolerance, were certified as intrinsically safe in accordance with the requirements of the IECEx standards. The standard top-exit model is the 786A-IS. The standard side-exit model is the 787A-IS, which is also available with a metric M8 mounting stud (model 787A-M8-IS). The 780A-IS is a compact sensor. ...

Laser Lines has recently marked a 10-character code on the outer ring of a customer's oil seal. At the 10.6 micron CO2 wavelength, rubber materials mark very well, but the unusual aspect of this mark was the size of the mark area on the outer ring: it measured only 1.25mm (0.049in) high. The marking set-up consisted of a Synrad laser, FH Flyer marking head and the Synrad Winmark Pro laser-marking software. The FH Flyer head was equipped with an 80mm focusing lens that provides a 116-micron spot with a 0.8mm depth of field. To create legible text marks, the rule of thumb is that character height should be a minimum of seven-to-ten times the focused spot size. For this application, the character code was 1mm high, which is on the low-end of the range for an 80mm lens. To create this mark, the 'Simple' stroke font was selected, a text height of 1mm was set, 0.15mm of extra character spacing was added, and a text radius of 54mm was entered to match the curvature of the seal....