How do you make industrial engineering training more attractive, and how do you ensure that graduates are better prepared for the reality of the professional field?  By letting students work and experiment with solutions that professionals use every day, of course. KU Leuven is therefore building a complete laboratory for Advanced motion control on Campus De Nayer in Belgium. This is based on Siemens components and realized by and for industrial engineering students.

“We have been playing with the idea for a long time to build something in which as much functionality as possible can be integrated in the field of automation and functional safety”, says Dr. Michel Van Dessel, expert in electrical drives and automation, who teaches at the Faculty of Engineering Technology of the KU Leuven in Belgium.  “So our goal was to build a fully functional setup with an inverted pendulum rod mounted on a carriage. After all, it makes it possible to experiment with 'real' movements, and also clearly indicates the importance of the safety functions."  This idea came about in collaboration with colleague Wouter Sas, assistant electricity and automation at Campus De Nayer of the KU Leuven.
The realized setup consists of a linear PM synchronous motor driven by a Sinamics S120 servo drive with the CU310-2 PN as control unit, and a Simatic ET 200SP I/O system based on a Simatic CPU 1515SP PC2 F Open controller with integrated HMI (Human Machine Interface) functionality. The Totally Integrated Automation Portal software package brings hardware and software together into a working whole.
The Simatic CPU with Open controller functionality can execute other code in addition to the conventional PLC program blocks, such as compiled MATLAB-Simulink code.  “In this way, we can apply advanced control technology based on full-state feedback modeling to the position control of the carriage and the mounted pendulum rod,” explains project leader Dr.ir. Michel Van Dessel out.  “It can be used for modeling the stabilization of a pendulum motion in cranes as well as for checking an inverted pendulum rod.”
For the basic 'motion control' functionality of the carriage – without taking the behavior of the pendulum rod into account – the setup built by KU Leuven Campus De Nayer uses Technology Objects in TIA Portal. y The safety aspects of the setup are managed by the Safety Integrated functionalities in both the controller and the drive, and are configured in TIA Portal.