Advanced Energy’s SCR power controller brings Industry 4.0 to precision heating applications

Advanced Energy Industries expanded its market-leading line of SCR (silicon controlled rectifier) power controllers by launching a new Thyro-A+ for precision industrial and semiconductor heating applications. Thyro-A+ provides customers with next-generation SCR accuracy and load monitoring, the industry’s smallest design footprint and new digital control capabilities for precision heating, melting, drying and forming applications.

Thyro-A+ has a completely redesigned control engine, enabling a 16x increase to measurement sampling rate over the Thyro-A, for enhanced control accuracy, which substantially improves process uniformity and repeatability, reduces energy consumption, and increases process throughput in precision heating applications. It comes with the industry’s smallest design footprint, delivering industry-leading power density.

Featuring a new optional LED display for easy commissioning or visualization, Thyro-A+ offers a number of advanced digital capabilities for remote controlling, self-monitoring and a digital control interface for integration with other connected factory software and applications to deliver on the promise of Industry 4.0.

“Building on Advanced Energy’s renowned family of SCR power controllers, the Thyro-A+ is our most advanced SCR, further expanding the range and capabilities of our solutions to meet the heating application requirements of our industrial and semiconductor customers,” said Andreas Breitkopf, director, photonics and PCS products at Advanced Energy. “Among AE’s other SCR power controllers, Thyro-A+ is certified in the Rockwell Encompass Partner program and connects directly with Rockwell Automation Logix PAC systems, providing customers with a straightforward path to fully integrated system designs.”

Thyro-A+ rounds out AE’s Thyro family of power controllers, which includes Thyro-S, Thyro-A eco, Thyro-A and Thyro-PX series. Thyro-A+ has a new powerful controller, which delivers on industry-leading accuracy, load monitoring and control of power for heating elements, resistive loads and transformer loads in a wide range of heating applications.

The design provides lightning-fast installation and replacement with “copy-paste” configuration profiles that easily transfer system parameters between multiple SCR power controllers. Customers reduce system installation costs with the most compact SCR footprint available, and a wide variety of fieldbus protocols allow for the most efficient installation possible, allowing for effortless integration into existing enterprise applications for critical thermal processes.