Description

This reference design is a solenoid driver that implements additional monitoring control as well as diagnostic features. These features enable for example: lose spring detection: valve aging recognition and dynamic control of solenoid current. This predictive maintenance feature-set helps to decrease or even eliminate factory downtime. Moreover: the control of the solenoid current supports energy saving and increased valve lifetime. The integrated IO-Link interface provides the possibility of communication between Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) and actuator to leverage the predictive maintenance feature-set. The switching of the solenoid is realized using the PWM output of the microcontroller (MCU) to drive the current of a FET: which then supplies the solenoid switching current. The current signature is sampled with the on-chip 12-bit ADC and stored in the on-chip FRAM. This reference design implements a moving average calculation and a calculation of extreme values of the current signature curve.