European Engineers Conference (EEC)

The annual European Engineers Conference (EEC) took place for the 15th time from July 9 to 11.

This year, the participants met virtually to discuss projects, their challenges and the resulting solutions. Engineers from the country organizations (YCOs) discussed with their colleagues and the product managers from headquarters the various solutions that can be used to meet customer requirements. The participating application and technical support engineers also spoke about the challenges of their daily work and shared their methods and successes with the 65 EEC participants.

Yaskawa's Value Stream and Product Managers introduced several new products that will be launched in the coming months: The LA700 is a high-performance drive for elevators; Sigma-X servo drives offer a new level of evolution in quality, dynamics, precision and intelligent data processing.

In addition, one of our engineers from Engineering Solutions & Support took his colleagues on a walk through the world of vacuum technology. The conclusion of this little “hike”: the use of vacuum pumps is necessary for many production processes, and drives are a fundamental part of these machines.

Another highlight of the 3-day conference was the contributions from the YCOs. The individual country representatives took the opportunity to present particularly interesting applications to their colleagues as best practice.

For example, a video showed how our GA500 drives the wheels of a fully autonomous tractor. And to stay with success stories in agriculture: To cultivate strawberries professionally, they are planted and cultivated in foil tubes. Thanks to our servo drives and motion controllers, the planting holes are cut with high precision and enormous throughput in the film tubes into which the strawberry plants are inserted.

Another application with components from Yaskawa comes from the automotive industry: robots, MP3300 machine controllers, direct-drive motors and Sigma-5 servos combine to form a handling application for attaching adhesive labels to car bodies.

And finally, using an application example from the textile industry, the event participants were able to see how the energy buffering function of the GA700 frequency inverter enables weaving machines to be shut down smoothly. This function uses the kinetic energy from the machine to shut down the looms in a controlled manner in the event of a “power off”, thereby preventing the yarns from breaking.

The participants agreed: “The regular exchange of applications and experiences as well as the transfer of technical know-how enable our engineers to find faster and better solutions for customer requirements.