nooooo....

you don't want electrical or pneumatic connectors to take care of alignment.
you would need to add mechanical locating features that align mating sides before they engage.
topically those would be round dowels with some tapering...

so first 20-30% of travel is just approach
next 20-30% of travel is locating
and then rest of the travel is mating of connections.


here is a sketch of such vampire teeth (usually metal) and counterpart blocks (usually plastic).

View attachment 180925

Yes, thank you. I am very much aware of what you're saying, I've been designing machinery for 30 years now and of course I would never use the contacts themselves to take care of alignment. What I meant to say is that I'd use the shell itself to perform that function, and adding a couple of male-female hardened SS pins to the assembly is also on the table.

Only thing I don't like so far about Harting is its pneumatic connectors, they don't look hefty enough for my taste. I think there are a couple of distributors down here that I could go visit and then see things personally. I'd get a much better feeling of what's available that way.

 

Oh... you got me worried for a second...

 

I need to energize an assembly mounted on a machine that has a rotary stage. This stage has several pneumatic components that will in turn be actuating a few mechanisms. I need to find an electrical connector that would be automatically engaged/disengaged from this assembly using a pneumatic actuator. To avoid using too many cables, I've decided that the best way to go around it is to mount the controller on the rotary stage itself. That way only ground, power (which will be regulated and current-limited 12 VDC) and a couple of differential communication lines would be used. That is, only six cables would be needed, plus a pneumatic (about 90 psi) line.

Question, (leaving aside the need for a pneumatic line for the moment) is there a connector out there that could be used for this purpose? Maximum current drawn through its power line would be about 1 amp. As has already been mentioned, the connector would be engaged/disengaged by a pneumatic actuator. So it has to be able to tolerate small misalignments, and should not be of the locking type. The number of daily cycles would be significant, in the order of a couple of thousand.

@MaxHeadRoom , this little challenge might be of your interest.

I believe you're looking for a slip-ring set.

 

http://mercotac.com/index.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpaPzw46a4wIVk8BkCh2E0w7nEAAYASAAEgLo2PD_BwE

 

This sounds a whole lot like a "dial Machine", which is driven by an indexer. So it steps some number of degrees, depending on how many positions it has. An air cylinder driving a block with the Pogo pins can certainly work very well, I have used that several times. There are also pin and socket connectors that are made to stand up for that much operation, they are expensive. Beware of the problem of dirt accumulating on connector surfaces when you use the pogo pins. We bought them from Newark, others also sell them. And a setup that looks a lot like a set of slip rings may be the easy way to go. AND use redundant pins for each circuit if you need any kind of reliability. 2 or 3 pins for each circuit is reasonable.

 

There are times when I fal to check the posting date on a comment.
So how is it that these "old" threads get re-posted? Is there some software problem that has not yet been discovered?
Here is a suggestion, which is to change the font color after a thread has been inactive for longer than some amount of time.

 

Hello,

@MisterBill2 , The post in this thread was spam that I have removed.

Bertus