Industrial Personal Computer (IPC) is an industrial control computer, which is a general term for tools that use a bus structure to detect and control the production process, electromechanical equipment, and process equipment. Industrial personal computers have important computer attributes and characteristics, such as computer CPU, hard disk, memory, peripherals and interfaces, as well as operating systems, control networks and protocols, computing power, and friendly human-machine interface. The products and technologies of the industrial control industry are very special and belong to intermediate products, which provide reliable, embedded and intelligent industrial computers for other industries.
IPC has the following characteristics:
Reliability: The Industrial Control Computer (IPC) has the characteristics of long-term normal operation, rapid diagnosis and maintainability in harsh environments such as dust, smoke, high/low temperature, humidity, vibration, corrosion, etc. Its MTTR (MeanTimetoRepair) is generally 5min, The MTTF is more than 100,000 hours, while the MTTF of ordinary PCs is only 10,000 to 15,000 hours.
Real-time: IPC conducts real-time online detection and control of industrial production processes, responds quickly to changes in working conditions, collects and adjusts output in time (the watchdog function is not available in ordinary PCs), self-reset in distress, guarantees normal operation of the system.
Expansion: IPC has strong input and output function due to the baseboard plus CPU card structure, and can expand up to 20 boards, which can be connected with various peripherals and boards in the industrial field, such as road controllers and video surveillance systems. , vehicle detectors, etc. to complete various tasks.
Compatibility: IPC can use ISA and PCI and PICMG resources at the same time, and supports various operating systems, multi-language assembly, and multi-tasking operating systems.
Based on the above characteristics, according to IPC statistics in 2000, it has accounted for more than 95 percent of general-purpose computers. Because of its low price, high quality, large output, and abundant software/hardware resources, it has been familiar and recognized by the majority of technical personnel. It is the basis of industrial computer fever. Its main components are industrial chassis, passive backplane and various boards that can be inserted on it, such as CPU card, I/O card, etc. And adopt the design of all-steel casing, machine card layer filter, double positive pressure fan and EMC (electromagnetic compatibility) technology to solve the electromagnetic interference, vibration, dust, high/low temperature and other problems in the industrial site.
The main structure of the industrial computer:
1. All-steel chassis
The all-steel chassis of IPC is designed according to the standard, which is anti-shock, anti-vibration and anti-electromagnetic interference, and a passive backplane compatible with PC-bus can be installed inside.
Industrial control chassis classification:
(1) The height is generally divided into 1U (44MM430MMXX), 2U (88430XX), 3U, 4U (176MM430MMXX), 5U, 6U, 7U, 8U, etc. The height of a 1U is 44MM , other heights and so on;
(2) Length: There are two international standard lengths, 450MM and 505MM. According to the specific requirements of customers, other lengths can also be expanded, such as: 480MM, 500MM, 520MM, 530MM, 600MM, etc. The size of the 450MM520MM case accounts for More than 90 percent of the market demand; the role of the elongated chassis is mainly the following three: one is to install a dual-CPU Xeon 12" 13" motherboard, which must be 520MM in length to install such a large board; the other is to install Industrial CPU long cards or 300MM long video cards need enough expansion space; the last one is the consideration of cooling space, because some monitoring users need to install multi-channel video cards and multiple hard disks, such as 64-channel, 128-channel, etc., 10 A hard disk needs good cooling effect;
(3) Horizontal and wall-mounted
Wall Mount: In addition, as some equipment manufacturers need to place the Control Center (IPC) in their equipment. Therefore, there are stricter requirements on the volume of the industrial computer. The volume of the traditional rack-mounted 19-inch chassis is basically difficult to meet the requirements, so a wall-mounted chassis is introduced to meet such customer needs. For example, a certain brand of IPC-6606/6608 wall-mounted chassis series. Due to the small size of this type of chassis and the application environment inside a device, the design concept also focuses on heat dissipation and expansion performance. The figure below shows the internal state of the cabinet where IPC-6806 is applied to a test platform.
Internal structure of industrial control chassis:
Hard disk rack, optical drive rack: There are generally two types of hard disk racks, one is a split type, and the other is a pressure card type.
High-quality chassis generally have metal spring shock-proof function; the number of installed hard disks is generally from 4 to 15;
Bottom plate: There are various specifications of the bottom plate; it is mainly divided by the specifications of the motherboard. Ordinary motherboards can generally be installed; among them, a chassis with a length of 520MM or less cannot be installed with a 1213 dual-to-power board motherboard, and a chassis with a length of 520MM must be installed.
Pressure card strip: mainly plays a fixed role. When installing a video long card with security monitoring, or an industrial CPU long card, the long card must be fixed to avoid shaking and instability during use.
Expansion of rear slots: there are 7 slots or 14 slots; the main purpose of the 14-slot backplane is to install multi-channel video cards, such as some large monitoring systems, 64 channels or 128 channels must be replaced. 14-slot backplane;
Thermal conduction of industrial control chassis: The rationality of the heat dissipation structure is an important factor related to whether the computer can work stably.
Shock resistance of the industrial control chassis: When the industrial control chassis is working, the optical drive, hard disk, and multiple fans in the chassis will vibrate at high speed, and the vibration can easily lead to misreading of the disc, damage to the hard disk track, and data loss. , so the shock resistance of the chassis is also a key structural design scheme of the chassis.
Electromagnetic shielding of industrial control chassis: When the host is working, the main board, CPU, memory and various boards will generate a large amount of electromagnetic radiation, which will cause certain damage to the human body if it is not prevented. At this time, the chassis has become an important line of defense to shield electromagnetic radiation and protect health. A well-shielded chassis can also effectively block external radiation interference and ensure that the internal components of the computer are not affected by external radiation. In order to increase the heat dissipation effect of the industrial control chassis, the necessary parts of the chassis will have holes, including the side plate holes of the box body, the air intake holes of the exhaust fan, and the exhaust holes of the exhaust fan, etc., so the shape of the holes must conform to the technology that can block radiation. Require. The openings on the chassis should be as small as possible, and round holes with strong radiation blocking ability should be used as much as possible. Secondly, pay attention to the electromagnetic shielding of various indicator lights and switch wiring. Longer connecting wires need to be designed as stranded wires, and the exposed welded metal parts at both ends of the wires must be wrapped with rubber sleeves, so as to avoid electromagnetic radiation generated by electrical circuits in the chassis.
2. Passive backplane
The slots of the passive backplane consist of bus expansion slots. The bus expansion slot can be composed of multiple slots for expanding the ISA bus, PCI bus, PCI-E bus, and PICMG bus according to the actual application of the user. There are requirements for the combination and matching of various buses in the version. For example, the PCIMG1.3 version bus does not provide ISA bus support. The board has a four-layer structure, and the middle two layers are the ground layer and the power layer. This structure can weaken the logic signal on the board. mutual interference and reduce power supply impedance. The backplane can be plugged with various boards, including CPU cards, display cards, control cards, and I/O cards.
3. Industrial power supply
In the early days, the previous industrial computers mainly used Intel Pentium processors as AT switching power supplies. Like PCs, they mainly used ATX power supplies, with an average trouble-free running time of 250,000 hours.
4. CPU card
There are many kinds of IPC CPU cards, which can be divided into long cards and half-length cards according to their size. Most of them use desktop system processors. i3\i5\i7 series and other processors, motherboard users can choose any according to their needs. Its main features are: working temperature 0-60 degree ; with hardware "watchdog" timer; some CPU cards that require low power consumption use embedded series of CPUs.
5. Other accessories
Other accessories of IPC are basically compatible with PC, mainly including CPU, memory, graphics card, hard disk, floppy drive, keyboard, mouse, CD-ROM, monitor and so on.
Applicable fields:
IPC has been widely used in all aspects of industry and people's life.
For example: control site, road and bridge control charging system, medical equipment, environmental protection monitoring, communication security, intelligent traffic control system, building monitoring and security, voice call center, queuing machine, POS counter cash register, numerical control machine tool, fuel dispenser, financial information processing , petrochemical data acquisition and processing, geophysical exploration, field portable operations, environmental protection, military industry, electric power, railways, highways, aerospace, subways, intelligent buildings, outdoor advertising.
