EC: EL7211 servo terminal

Motion Control — Servo Drives: The Beckhoff EL7211 servo terminal is a complete compact servo drive with an output current of up to 4.5 ARMS—integrated into a 24-mm wide EtherCAT terminal housing. This is a Control Engineering 2015 Engineers’ Choice finalist.

By Control Engineering October 20, 2014

With the EL7211 servo terminal, the EtherCAT I/O system from Beckhoff Automation now offers a complete compact servo drive with an output current of up to 4.5 ARMS-integrated into a space-saving, 24-mm wide terminal housing. This advanced EtherCAT Terminal is available with integrated resolver interface or with one cable technology (OCT). When used in combination with Beckhoff servo motors, users take advantage of an extremely compact, efficient and inexpensive EtherCAT servo system.

The EL7211 servomotor EtherCAT Terminal with integrated resolver interface offers impressive drive power in a remarkably compact design for AM31xx and AM81xx series motors from Beckhoff. Designed with a 24-mm terminal housing, it delivers higher performance, with up to 4.5 ARMS at 50 Vdc. This is an increase over the already proven and popular 12-mm wide EL7201 servomotor terminal with 2.8 ARMS.

OCT simplifies installation and reduces costs

As the EL7211-0010 servomotor terminal supports absolute encoders, it is ideal for the AM81xx servomotor series with OCT. OCT combines power and feedback signals into one standard motor cable and significantly reduces material and commissioning costs. The integrated electronic identification plate of the servomotors can be read in automatically by the EL7211-0010 EtherCAT terminal which simplifies motor commissioning.

The fast control technology of the EL7211 servomotor terminal, which is achieved through field-oriented current and PI speed control, is ideal for fast and highly dynamic positioning tasks. The monitoring of numerous parameters, e.g. overvoltage and undervoltage, overcurrent, terminal temperature or motor load via the calculation of an I2T model, offers maximum operational reliability. EtherCAT, as a high-performance communication system, and CAN over EtherCAT (CoE) as the application layer, serve as the optimum interface with PC-based control technology.

Beckhoff Automation 

www.beckhoffautomation.com