Watson-Marlow is essentially the standard for pump bioreactor controllers. Not only are they dedicated to providing a quality product, Watson-Marlow is also making it easy for system integrators and OEMs to find and purchase their products. They have dedicated print and web catalogs for their OEM products. Here you can see thoughtful design consideration with pump heads of a variety of sizes (above image features Watson-Marlow’s DriveSure OEM Peristaltic Pump with 313D pump head). In addition to the pump head, a variety of matching motors are usually available. This includes AC, DC and stepper motors. The combination is compact and designed exceptionally well for “box” builders.
Watson-Marlow DriveSure control box from ILS Automation
Extending this design philosophy, Watson-Marlow DriveSure™ technology is provided to integrators and OEMs with a well-packaged solution that takes the fuss out of providing variable-speed pumps. This solution is designed for panel or box mounting and includes the motor controller, motor, panel mount and a choice of pump head. The DriveSure™ makes it easy to provide all the “bells-and-whistles” to PLCs or embedded controllers. This includes on/off, RPM (0-10v or 4-20mA), direction, fault and RPM counter pulse. The inputs are sinking NPN, which is a less common PLC output type, but this does provide a means for adding a rocker switch to manually control the pump.
Watson-Marlow DriveSure Case Study
ILS has a customer who wanted three variable speed pump heads, nicely packaged, that could be mounted in a separate remote panel. This panel could mount closer to the bioreactor yet still communicate with the main controller. ILS chose to integrate the pumps in a separate box that includes a remote terminal unit (RTU) that supports Modbus. Therefore, only power and an Ethernet connection is required for complete control. This design provides the customer the flexibility to mount the panel where it is deemed most appropriate. The RTU we chose is a Red Lion Sixnet RTU, which will be covered in a subsequent post.
