Schneider Electric has added to its range of Preventa safety products with the Preventa XPS MCM, a modular safety controller designed to protect industry machines and operators from incidents involving moving machine parts.
The configurable, embedded safety controller is capable of monitoring multiple safety functions, including emergency stop, guard monitoring, perimeter guarding, position and speed monitoring. It features eight digital inputs and two digital outputs and can be expanded to up to 128 digital inputs and 16 digital outputs (relay or solid state). It is simple to expand a configuration from small to large due to a range of communication modules. It is also possible to build up to six island architectures via safe communication, with a distance of up to 50 m between each island. Expansion is possible directly on the controller backplane bus as well as via the safe expansion bus.
The safety controller is suitable for safety applications requiring conformity with Category 4 standards EN ISO 13849-1 and SIL3 EN/IEC 61508. An intuitive software and hardware layout optimises the system configuration, allowing the controller to be connected anywhere. To simplify the machine maintenance, the system has a removable memory card which can be used to transfer the configuration to another controller in a single step.