Equipment Cabinet

The traditional way of making a cabinet for holding industrial controls has been to weld together steel plates, drill some holes, then attach rails and doors. That method is giving way to a modular technique that employs quick-assembly panels on a frame that can be reconfigured, if need be, to handle changes in controls and equipment. In this short video, Rittal's Steve Sullivan takes us through how a modular cabinet goes together and comes apart, along with the options it can contain for wiring schemes and the mounting of equipment.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] hi I'm Lee tesler with design World magazine and I'm here with Steve Sullivan from retal and we're about to tear apart a ts8 modular cabinet now back in the old days when I was a young lad we used to make cabinets that were just all welded together we drill holes in them and mount stuff to them increasingly that's not the way you do

00:00:28 it anymore and we're going to take a close look at you really should be doing it Steve as I uh mentioned this is a modular cabinet I'd kind of like to show exactly what that means can you take the door off and can we take the side panels off sure how easy is that really easy I'm going to show you first we'll take the double bit key we'll unlock the cabinet that's our opening mechanism now

00:00:53 to to take the door off really just need a flat blade screwdriver and we have accessories for this but this is the easiest thing that's laying around around what I like to do is just wedge wedge into a gap and start to pry the hinge pins down and I leave the top one on so that it takes the weight so I can work my way down and not have to worry about anything with the

00:01:20 door last but not least and then here's the door off pretty quick pretty simple one person job that's awesome what's the uh purpose of the rail and the door this door frame is standard as well and what we do is we Mount accessories to this so This standard door will hold over 200 lb so very heavy air conditioner or if you want to put document holders on there uh

00:01:45 laptop stands riding boards even mounting Den rail or different accessory rails to allow us to mount a lot of controls to the door that's awesome well the door came off pretty quickly what about the side panels okay side panels what I'm going to use they're sold as a pair and what I'm going to use is a T30 to remove the

00:02:11 [Music] Fasteners now you'll notice with the panel I don't have to worry about it falling over on me this is designed to hold itself to the cabinet with some hangers and then when I'm ready to remove it I can just simply remove it this way and now my side panels off I'll do the same thing to the other side

00:02:43 [Applause] absolutely the order doesn't matter I just have my preference to leaving the last one com at the top and again simple just reach pull you can see the gasket here ground provisions on the bottom every panel on the TS has ground studs or provisions on it so Le want to show you a couple things about this

00:03:18 cabinet these are the things these little hangers allowed me to put that panel up there and they're just a press fit and so when they put on like that it allows this to be a onep person job just to hang my panel so it's safe and it's easy and the other thing that you noticed that picked up on the grounding was on these sidewall brackets they actually have sharp metal

00:03:41 teeth and that's what causes the ground back from every external panel back to the frame those side panels came off pretty quickly what about the back panel back panel is really easy too and what we have are two Fasteners [Music] here and these are torch Fastener as I take these out and unlike other designs I don't

00:04:06 have to lay the cabinet down to take this panel out everything's done just like this and there's actually safety features built into these brackets so not until I'm ready to remove the panel do I lift these up and I'm on to step in front to remove this panel it simply slides out lift the panel out of the way and now I can take it to do to mount my

00:04:25 controls that's as simple as it is to get this panel in and out now Steve if we were using a conventional panel that's and a conventional cabinet that's all welded together um I think it'd be a little heavier and I think the uh the P the panels itself would be have a little bit thicker gauge steel because you're actually making uh connections to it um what's the difference in those two

00:04:50 Styles well the standard panel from a competitor for example is is painted first of all so there's a lot of prep work to work with that panel first and then secondly just getting it out typical uh user of another competitor cabinet would lay the cabinet down and then they would have to hoist it out so they would have to get a crane or a hoist or some other workers and then

00:05:10 they physically lift that panel out so there's a lot of time and labor involved in doing that what we just simply slit ours out and then the benefit here to what's called a hot dip galvaniz or many people will call it zinc plated but there's a difference there there's no there's no prep once you put a component on here it's instantly grounded it gives you better corrosion resistance and the

00:05:30 third thing is increased shielding Effectiveness just because of the zinc coating Steve we got obviously for controls cabinet you got a A lot of wiring and cables coming in um how do you manage those in a modular cabinet like this easiest thing with a modular cabinet is a cable Plate System that's in the base that'll show you as opposed to just a solid pan so what I'll do

00:05:50 first of all is I'll remove the mounting panel slide rails because we don't need these now this is only for the removal installation of the panel I can get these out of the way this opens up a greater area in the bottom to work with my cables and I can get TurnKey Solutions as accessories to put in here but the standard design is set up so that if I want to remove these

00:06:12 plates or just open them up I remove these small Fasteners and this just simply slides up like that I bring my wires and cables through there and we can put accessories on the bottom to manage those cables and provide strain relief but it can be that simple and then we line that with gasket that's already provided with every cabinet I can also take these plates and rearrange

00:06:33 them I can make cutouts in them or I can order accessories that are already set up for certain types of cable management quite often you want to mount equipment inside these things I understand it's pretty easy to get a system chassis to slide into it to actually accomplish that could you show us how that happens sure I've got a couple of them with me here these are the system chassis and

00:06:54 the unique shape of the ts8 frame allows us to have both an inner level and now level so these chassis will accommodate that and to put them in you literally just slide them into the whole pattern and they just drop into place just like that and then I can put one on for the inner level same process right into place and if I want

00:07:20 to secure them with the self-tapping screw I'm done and like you said you can mount all kinds of climate control or other controls to those chassis how much weight can you accommodate with one of these things it really depends on the the length of the rail but a rail like that could be a couple hundred pounds really interesting is there a limit to how much the cabinet can hold we have

00:07:41 tested the cabinet to over 3,000 lbs of load in just a frame that's without any of the other panels on the outside just with the frame alone will support that's a pretty impressive U load that this thing can handle why can it handle so much it's a good question one of the unique things that Ral does is rle form steel so we're taking a single piece of Steel the TSA vertical profile as you

00:08:04 can see here has been folded 16 times laser welded down the middle and when you do that you create a closed channel the closed channel is what affords Incredible strength in a lightweight uh profile and so this is the frame structure of a ts8 that gives us the vertical profiles that are extremely strong we have one Bay here what if I want to add another one what do I do

00:08:27 great question Lee what the one of the beauty of modular product has the ability to Bay multiple cabinets together many more cabinets you could with just a welded box so what lends itself to that in the ts8 frame is that this is symmetrical not only front to back but the sides if we turn it and look at the side profile this is identical all the way around so this

00:08:47 allows us to bake cabinet side to side front to back and even stack them top to bottom so how would a second cabin attach here what we do is in every ts8 you get a hardware bag and in that Hardware bag is some gasket that's for the environmental seal once you apply the gasket you push the cabinets together put some bang Hardware in there and you can do that for as long as you

00:09:10 want to go with enclosures well I notice that all these inner surfaces are painted kind of curious how you do that well Le what we do with this Frame is since it's closed channel that is the the challenge how do you paint inside of that so we use a very unique uh paint process so as it goes through the pre-treatment process it's an eight-stage cleaning and prep process

00:09:33 which includes a nano coating today and then it goes into the primer bath our primer bath is 100,000 gallons of primer paint and the tank we completely submerge the product into the uh bath and then it's electrostatic so we completely coat the inside and the outside and then it goes through a powder coat process where it gets powder coated and then back into the oven so it

00:09:57 this cabinet has a three-stage uh paint process that nobody else uses in our industry now Steve this ts8 is not a shielded cabinet but I did want to talk a little bit about the grounding on it okay obviously we're not in an anaco chamber and I don't have an RF generator but um nevertheless because the grounding is actually pretty good on this thing wanted to show take a couple

00:10:18 of ohm meter readings and just show what we find like from the eyelet to the hinge on the door we get like zero ohms and uh even to the rail on the door even though we've got uh the door open and uh we've got a polyurethane gasket on the door if this was shut the grounding would actually still be pretty good we'll also see that there's no special grounding straps and there's no special

00:10:48 bus bars installed in this thing but um what actually would be the the uh decrease in field strength if we could close the door and head Electronics in this thing from the outside the inside well with the TSA because of the grounding that's built into it we take the standard level of a protection from an enclosure and add 20 dbls so that would reduce your strength from let's

00:11:10 say 10 to one so anything that's outside would Reduce by uh you would only have one/ tenth of what gets into the cabinet that's great that's pretty good that's the way it's set up our customers don't have to use a bunch of ground straps and Hardware the standard ts8 is designed like that right off the factory floor we've been talking about industrial cabinets that typically have industrial

00:11:29 control in them but increasingly industrial settings you find electronic instruments that sit in 19in racks but I understand there's a way to accomodate those even in an industrial control cabinet can you tell us about that a little bit Steve sure that's one of the benefits of a modular frame based system because it allows you to create multiple layers or levels within that same

00:11:49 cabinet so one of the examples that we have today of course ethern at the plant floor and we have a swing frame here so this is a full height swing frame you can also get them in partial sizes and it allows you to to mount your 19-in rack mount equipment and then just swing it out of the way to either the connectors or wires on the back and still hit your panel mounted devices on

00:12:08 the mounting panel how many instruments can you accommodate in a frame like that well this is probably along a line of a 42u swing frame so 42 components that would be 1.75 in in height so quite a number that's quite an interesting feature and I had no idea there was so much technology involved in an industrial cabinet so thanks to that Steve and um where can our viewers go to

00:12:32 get more information about all these things viewers can go to our website for more information and for more videos just like this one go to designworld online.com