An IEC 61131-3-Based PLC Timers Module Implemented on FPGA Platform

Abstract

In assembling units, the PLC plays a significant role in measuring and controlling various applications like motor control, blending of fluid inside tanks, fluid level control of tanks and others. The existing PLCs are offering sluggish response and poor scanning time based on sequential processing execution. This paper has proposed various delay timer modules of PLC on reconfigurable FPGA-LabVIEW platform with IEC 61131-3 standard compliant. The GUI and LD-based input user program are created with the assistance of LabVIEW, and it is assembled with a massive parallel processing-based hardware structure inside FPGA. The TON, TOFF, RTON and RTOFF timer modules are developed with various time-based values like 1–1000 ms. Others PLC functions like AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, X-OR and X-NOR, PT and OT are realized and simulated with timer module. The PLCs-based delay timer modules are fully implemented inside FPGA hardware (NI myRIO-1900). Proposed algorithm is validated on DC motor, electrical oven and single tank systems along with the comparison of SIMATIC S7-200 PLC. The proposed design offers remarkable benefits like user friendliness, cost-effectiveness, miniaturization, simplicity, faster speed and scanning time.