Putting Components Precisely in their Place

When you’re mounting the components in your control panel, how do you decide exactly where to place them? Your answer, most probably, is that you refer to the general assembly (GA) drawing.

But how accurate is the GA drawing and how can you be sure that the panel designer has taken into account all those little – but rather important – things like making sure there’s enough space around heat-generating components to allow for cooling air to flow? Or checking that when the door closes, the door-mounted components won’t foul those mounted inside the enclosure?

Most panel builders will be only too familiar with problems like these and will also be aware that putting them right involves a lot of time, money and aggravation. That’s a pity, because component placement problems can be easily avoided by using the EPLAN Pro Panel computer aided engineering (CAE) package, which is ideally suited for control panel design.

With EPLAN Pro Panel, design engineers can work with 3D views of the control panel, which means they can easily work out the best arrangement of component to optimise space usage and to make wiring easy. Where applicable, the software automatically enforces minimum spacing requirements around components and checks for potential collisions between door- and chassis-mounted devices.

3D component views in EPLAN Pro Panel, making design easier. 

The 3D representations of the panel are not only an excellent design aid, they’re also a valuable addition to the panel documentation to help guide future maintenance. But they’re not the best drawings to guide component mounting! So EPLAN Pro Panel uses the 3D design data to produce 2D panel and door layout drawings. These are the modern-day equivalent of the old GA drawings, but the big difference is that they’re guaranteed to be accurate, they can be scaled as required, and that there are never problems with component collisions.

2D documentation is easy to generate from the 3D drawing in EPLAN Pro Panel.

The 2D layout drawings speed up assembly, and help to ensure that all components in the panel are placed precisely as they should be, first time, every time. The time, money and effort saved means more profit for the panel builder. Why not find out more and give your business a boost? The next step is easy: just click on the button below to download our interesting and insightful white paper for panel builders.