Making a Large Difference with Elcad

Siemens drives require up to 5 electrical cabinets comprising diagrams with up to 1,000 sheets and Elcad is the CAE system for creating such diagrams

In the Automation and Drives department of the Siemens group, Large Drives is one of eleven lines of business that together employ over 51,000 co-workers worldwide.

Large Drives offers optimal solutions wherever large drives are sought after in industry and infrastructure.

For huge ship drives or drives for excavation dredgers and ball mills in mining, for motors and converters for rail vehicles of any type, or for pumps in water management.

For all of these applications, it advantageous to use variable-speed drives.

For this purpose Siemens Large Drives has developed intermediate voltage converters that allow one to adapt the motor speed to the current needs.

Their use considerably increases the efficiency and may save as much as 50% energy e.g in water management.

Moreover the flow rate can be controlled considerably more precisely than with mechanical control concepts, and the smoother starting and braking sequences conserve the facilities.

Continuous improvement of this efficiency for furthering customer benefits is the incentive that drives the Siemens engineers to continue to innovatively and creatively optimize the drive technology.

One tool crucial for the realization of this efficiency goal is provided by Aucotec.

The huge Siemens drives require up to 5 electrical cabinets comprising diagrams with up to 1,000 sheets.

Elcad is the CAE system for creating such diagrams.

Wiring lists and circuit diagrams are automatically generated by the software; it supports the SAP variant configuration, is equipped with a practice-oriented range of interfaces and can be integrated into the Sinamics configuration process as well as into the Siemens 3D cabling.

"By using Elcad, we save on average four hours per plan estimate when the projects comprise up to 250 drawings".

"And there are areas where we process 3,000 projects annually", thus Wilhelm Sponsel, system administrator at Siemens AandD Large Drives.

Another decisive advantage of using the Siemens products worldwide are the multilingual options of the Aucotec software.

"When compared to the rest of the market, Elcad has established itself as by far the most convincing product for our purposes", continues Sponsel.

It is expandable and can easily be programmed with the Application Programming Interface (API).

Siemens considers it another advantage that the software can be adjusted to the customer's needs individually and in detail.

The circuit diagrams automatically created in Elcad can be supplemented anytime.

The up-to-date Windows user interface, the intuitive concept of operation and the Office-compliant editing dialogs were very convenient for the Siemens employees.

These features have also influenced the decision in favour of Elcad compared to the other CAE systems in the benchmark test, says Mr.Sponsel.

Routine operations such as the generation of lists or derived documents have due to Elcad been automated to the point where the user can actually concentrate on the essentials.

So that the effort used moves as much as possible.

No matter whether water, rocks, ships or trains, the main thing is efficiency.

Starting with the Elcad/AUCOPLAN version 7.3.1, Aucotec AG will have a 3-D cabinet link at its disposal.

An important advantage of this link is the support of the widely distributed Autodesk products AutoCAD, AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Inventor.

The 3D formats supported are DWG, Step and SAT.

Thus transmission to other 3D programs or 3D viewers is also possible.

The 3D drawings created are automatically stored within the project and can be reworked anytime.

The link to the AutoCAD programs is affected via a COM interface, the data conversion is based on the AutoCAD automation interface.

The intelligent transmission uses among other things the variable 3D block function in AutoCAD so that the user does not have to invest in the time consuming creation of fixed 3D blocks - the solution is ready to use and thus differs markedly from comparable solutions.

The 3D conversion is an extension of the Elcad cabinet module.

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