Hi all, I am new here and this is my first post. I signed up just for a bit of direction and advice. The title says it all. My education is just an associates in mechanical engineering technology. I started work as a mechanical tech, moved to engineer, switched jobs to be a tech again with a better company, moved to be closer to home as an engineer, now I work as a mechanical draftsman for a company making material handling equipment. Titles are just titles at the places I have worked.
In the past, I have always worked up the controls for the machines have designed, usually simple machines. The pdf attachment "app lumber moulder infeed controls" is from years ago. It is just a simple layout diagram.
Where I work now, we are doing some in house electrical schematic drawings (I hope). We currently have it contracted out which works great for us, but we want to be self sufficient. Since I have done controls in the past I jumped at the opportunity. But it is a slow process bringing this into our office and there is going to be little or no training. So I am educating myself on our IEC schematic drawing format. I have worked with hydraulics quite a lot in the past and the symbols do not confuse me. I have not designed controls with PLCs before, but that's too bad to understand. Our controls engineer specs the PLC, writes the programs, etc. The complex safety circuits are overwhelming at first glance, but the thing that is most confusing to me is just the format. It is so, so segmented. I don't think in terms of segmented electrical circuits. I can't upload any of our work, but I did attach a pdf of the old controls drawing redrawn in our format (basically in our format)
So here is a specific question for you. Page =02+P/1 looks horribly congested. I have removed the CM, P1, P5 circuit with switches S6 and S7 and placed that on another page since I emailed this to myself, but still its congested. Our panel builder says it looks fine and it is perfectly readable, but I want to learn to do this the right way. Would anyone here say it looks right? I did it that way because I didn't want to bust up a terminal strip onto multiple pages, but it still looks wrong to me.

Sorry to not have inserted images, all I had emailed myself were pdfs.
Any advice on doing more schematic work? Any critiques of my practice schematic? Please point out everything that is wrong, it's a learning process.
FYI that schematic was made on Elwin and we are considering SEE Electrical.

 

You maybe want to become familiar with ladder style schematic drawing, PLC's mimic the hardwired version in this manner.
Physical layout is useful but you also need ladders style for trouble shooting.
Assuming your country of origin is in N.A. Obtain a copy of NFPA79
Here is a one aid.
IEC is slightly different in the form of symbols and ladder drawn from top to bottom rather than NEC from left to right.
Max.

 

Hi Max,
I am from the U.S., but the company I work for uses IEC format.
I will not be programming PLC's, but I see that the ladder logic and ladder style NFPA format are similar.
I revised the project focusing on page =02+P/1. I am happier with it now.
We have our company standards for page layout, and the schematic has to follow those standards which somewhat reflect the physical layout.
I wanted to put those SOL (solenoid) components between the 120V potential runs and really make it look tidy, but those are machine mounted components so our drawing standards dictate they shown on a separate page or in an enclosed box labeled +M.

I think I will revise this again. I will spread it out more and my terminal strip will span 2 pages, but I suppose that is fine to do.

 

The only comment I would have is that for maintenance personnel purposes the ladder format for schematics is essential IMO.
As per the PLC ladder read out, it enables much faster down time problem solving caused by equipment failure.
Max.

 

Revised again, more "Ladder run" style. I am definitely more satisfied with this one.

Could I ask you Max, to tell me if this is a significant improvement? Or maybe just a slight improvement?
And this work is for automated machines. No electronic circuitry, just large, component-to-component and machine-to-machine wiring.

 

That should be sufficient for trouble shooting etc.
Max.