EPLAN and igus® – smart plastics: with “efficient engineering” towards intelligent maintenance

Richard Habering | 16. February 2022

EPLAN Electric P8, one of the main products of EPLAN GmbH & Co. KG, is considered one of the industry standards for electrical design and provides support in plant project planning from end-to-end planning to manufacturing, commissioning, maintenance and repair. Under the motto “efficient engineering”, further applications for machine, plant and enclosure construction are also being developed, such as eBUILD, a cloud-based solution from EPLAN, or the EPLAN Data Portal. This is an online platform for downloading digital product data for the EPLAN applications and thus serves as an integrated, web-based data platform for providing up-to-date device data for direct use in project planning with EPLAN software solutions.

Use EPLAN to reduce intelligent maintenance project planning effort

The typical project planning effort for a classic switch cabinet including all control modules comprises approx. 58 hours. Based on various studies, it was determined that a time optimisation of this project planning effort by more than 50% is possible. The smart plastics from igus® starts exactly at this point for its new switch cabinet modules i.Sense & i.Cee and simplifies daily work with the provision of the associated EPLAN product data. Because the core tasks of EPLAN can be summarised as follows:

• Collect engineering data
• Create circuit diagrams
• Manually create plant diagrams
• Perform standardised, template-based work
• Automatically complete machine and plant documentation

Users of EPLAN solutions benefit from efficiency increases in the product development process through standardised procedures, automated processes and consistent workflows. This means that new projects for intelligent maintenance can be implemented much faster with i.Sense from smart plastics. All mechanical information on the smart condition sensors can already be found anyway in the constantly growing igus CAD portal.

Where can I find the right smart plastics data for my electrical design?

You can find our EPLAN product data for the i.Sense and i.Cee intelligent maintenance modules right where it suits you best:

• In “EPLAN Data Portal” – in the browser or your EPLAN instance
• Via our download portal under Software
• Or right here on the blog (as of 16/2/2022):

You will also find the associated macros. All EPLAN macros have been created according to the “EPLAN Data Standard” and provide a wide range of information depending on what the product requires:

• Commercial data
• Logic macro
• Function template
• 3D graphics data

If a macro ever fails to meet your requirements, please let me know here in the comments section. Or use the feedback function directly in the “EPLAN Data Portal”.

High-quality EPLAN product data saves you time and money in design – smart plastics intelligent condition monitoring systems save you time and money in maintenance.