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JRoss

Ethernet/communications wiring in a CP

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Hey everybody, I'm just wondering what suggestions and recommendations the control panel gurus among you have for dealing with Ethernet cabling inside a control panel. I recently was at a job site that had a control panel with PLC, HMI, Graceport, and 9 AB PF40 drives on the Ethernet network. The unshielded Ethernet cables were neatly run through the same wireway as the signal and power wiring. Needless to say, the network was struggling, and one of the fixes was to replace the cables with shielded cables and removed them from the wireway. (we also replaced a series of daisy-chained hubs with a single managed switch...). We bundled the cables loosely, but didn't really have any good alternative to make things look neat, so we finally just left the cables hanging in the cabinet. So what are your recommendations/procedures/customs for dealing with comms wiring in a cabinet?

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Usually we try to take into account all of the issues you mentioned in our layouts. Keep as much of the high power high noise stuff to one side and the dc and comms to one area. I like to put the switch right near the graceport (we use them regularly) and keep the cables out of the wireways completely. If they have to cross any power we try to be as perpendicular as possible to prevent inductance. Drives can be a problem because they do tend to be very noisy. I haqve heard of people using an enclosed wireway that is itself shielded, or like you mention use shielded cable. I have also had a guru remove quite a bit of noise by calculating the harmonics of the drive based on the switching rate, and based on the clock speed of the ethernet system, adjust it so that it produced minimal interference. If you want to keep things neat and in the wireways and dont have alot of room, Panduit makes a good noise shield for their wireways, they are always happy to show it off at the trade shows with some sort of display.

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Sounds like you gotten the best advice. We're running Cat 6A Shieleded for everything just as precaution.

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