Drives are the muscles of automation and they are used in all parts of factory automation, process industry, and infrastructure. Today with smart automation and distributed control systems, modern drives are fully integrated in industrial communication. At PI this integration is PROFIdrive.
The PROFIdrive profile offers a unique and standardized interface for all kinds of motion applications on PROFINET and PROFIBUS. With PROFIdrive it’s easy to run drives from different vendors on the same control system or to exchange drives without changing the application program. So PROFIdrive brings a lot of benefits and money saving to drive-based automation projects.
PROFIdrive is well established as “The Drive Profile” for frequency converters, positioning drives and high performance servo drives at PROFIBUS and PROFINET. Also PROFIdrive was the first drive profile supporting drive based safety functionality according to IEC 61800-5.
PROFIdrive based products are still used worldwide in PROFIBUS based automation projects and have been for more than 20 years. Since 2007 PROFIdrive is an international standard as part of IEC61800-7 and since 2014 Chinese National Standard GB/T 25740.
Current market studies show about 1.5 million new PROFIdrive devices per year for PROFIBUS and 150 thousand for PROFINET, growing fast. So far PROFIdrive is the leading drive profile in the industrial automation market, ahead of all other drive profiles used on other fieldbus technologies and other Ethernet based communication systems.
Andreas Uhl