Zuken Addresses Complexity in Electrical Engineering

The latest release of Zuken’s electrical and fluid engineering solution, E³.series, addresses growing complexity within products and processes. Key enhancements are in the areas of topology planning, modularity support and variant handling, which are designed to support the requirements of manufacturing companies using modular product design to control complexity.

Other highlights include extended access to detailed information in electrical and fluid diagrams, cable plans and formboard drawings to increase productivity; further automation of the autorouting functionality for cabinet layout in E³.panel; and Polish language support.

“Most of the enhancements in E³.series 2018 have been developed in close collaboration with our global customers; in many cases to support their efficiency improvement programs,” Joachim Frank, E³.series business manager, says. “Zuken extended the modularity and variant management functions empowering the configuration management capabilities we recently introduced with our engineering data management environment DS-E3.”

Modular Project Support

E³.series offers design reuse support. Sub-circuits and fluid plans can be stored in a library and loaded into new designs with the aid of auto-connect functionality. With E³.series 2018, sub-circuits can be imported and exported, together with their node assignments and attributes. Attributes of all related nodes can be exported automatically, maintaining their inheritance properties, reducing manual effort and creating the prerequisites to automatically generate projects with configuration tools.

Efficient Variant Handling

The management of circuit variants and options has been extended with the ability to display multiple connectors with different variants and options in a single symbol. E³.series allows users to select individual configurations from 150% designs in the feature tree, from which individual configurations can be filtered. The related text, connection targets and wires placed on the connection line are displayed automatically, as variants or options are activated in the feature tree.

Topology Planning

Topology planning in E³.series has been enhanced to support loading and connecting of installation spaces to open connections. Unplaced components can be placed either into an installation space or together with an installation space.

Extended Access to Device/Connection Properties

Access to device properties and connection details in schematic, cable plan and formboard drawings has been enhanced to support the requirements of advanced users. A preview symbol is now displayed automatically when selecting a component in the device tree. Device table configurations can be stored as templates, so that the appropriate information for different process steps can be provided. User defined representations, such as corrugated tubes on curved connections, can be generated in the fonts library and applied to all graphical elements.

Ease of Use

Ease of use has been further enhanced by additional sorting and selecting capabilities in E³.schematic. Connections can now be sorted by assignment or location only, in addition to the existing sorting option by both assignment and location. Conductors in dynamic cable and wires can be renamed in alphabetical order, and selected object types (e.g., text) can be excluded or filtered from connections. The automatic routing of cables in E³.panel now also considers name equivalents in addition to equivalent symbols so that wires can be connected precisely to their intended terminal.

For more information, visit Zuken.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.