Industry: Industrial Automation
Customer Background:
A Chinese mid-sized automation equipment manufacturer supplying packaging machinery to food and pharmaceutical factories in Europe and Southeast Asia.
Challenge
The customer’s packaging lines operate continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Their existing sensor connections used standard M8 and M12 cables without sufficient shielding or environmental sealing.
After 3–6 months of operation, several issues began to appear:
- Machine vibration caused intermittent signal loss and production downtime.
- Water and dust entered the connectors during weekly cleaning, leading to pin corrosion.
- Electromagnetic interference from nearby servo drives caused occasional communication errors on the PROFINET network.
Our Solution
Shanwei Link supplied a complete connection solution including:
- Shielded M12 D-coded male-to-female cable assemblies for PROFINET communication.
- M12 A-coded sensor connectors with screw locking for proximity and photoelectric sensors.
- M12-to-RJ45 adapters for connecting field M12 interfaces to standard RJ45 ports on the PLC gateway.
The connectors were tested to IP67 and configured with gold-plated contacts and TPU cable jackets resistant to oil and cleaning agents.
Results
After one year of field operation:
- No connector-related downtime was reported across three production lines.
- PROFINET communication remained stable with no reported packet loss.
- IP67 sealing performance remained intact after repeated high-pressure cleaning.
- The customer subsequently placed quarterly orders for more than 2,000 connector assemblies.