Chapter 15: Panel Arrangements

Panel arrangement drawings depict equipment that is mounted on back panels inside electrical enclosures and show any front-panel penetrations. These arrangements accomplish several things: They convey construction detail about the contents and placement of front-panel equipment such as control switches and lights. They convey construction detail about the contents and placement of back-panel equipment. They show the placement and contents of any engraved labels. They provide a bill of materials for each item in the panel that must be purchased. They allow the external enclosure (i.e., the can) to be sized with confidence.

The anatomy of the drawing is very simple. It should show a graphic of the panel, usually on the left side, and a bill of materials, usually on the right. It is strictly a physical drawing showing the relative locations of the items in the panel. Graphic detail should be minimized, and no wiring detail need be included. Usually, a general not to scale arrangement is sufficient provided the designer is sure that any potential conflicts have been identified and scrutinized and any front-panel penetrations have been sufficiently detailed.

A. Procedure
One quick initial design method for creating these drawings uses Microsoft Excel as a design aid. Following is a procedure for turning your Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software into a design tool: 1. Turn the spreadsheet into a sheet of graph paper a. Open a new spreadsheet and click on the blank cell at the junction of the row labels and column labels. This selects the entire spreadsheet (turns it black). b. Place the mouse cursor at the top over any of the column labels and press the right mouse key. A pop-up menu appears. Select Column Width, and key in 1.71. Hit return. This makes all the cells in the spreadsheet square. Now, it is a sheet of graph paper. c. While the entire spreadsheet is selected, set the font size to 8 pt, and format the cells for center-center text. 1. Get rough size dimensions of the equipment to be mounted in the cabinet, and decide on a per square scale for your sketch. Usually 1-inch per square is good enough, which will be our choice here. If the drawing toolbar is not visible, select View on the top menu, then select Toolbars, and activate the drawing toolbar. Pick cell D4 as the upper corner of the panel and type an apostrophe plus a one (1) and hit return. You will see a 1 displayed, but the leading apostrophe tells Microsoft Excel to treat the cell as a text data type. Click on

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the cell, grab the handle on the lower right of the cell, and pull to the right. A scale of horizontal inches appears. 4. Pick cell C5, type 1, grab the handle and pull down. This results in a scale of vertical inches. The upper left corner of cell D5 is now the upper left corner of your panel. Draw the panel contents to scale. On the drawing menu, select Rectangle. With the ALT key depressed, draw a rectangle. Here are some things to note about using Microsoft Excel for this purpose: With the ALT key depressed, elements that are drawn are on the grid. The grid is the upper left corner of the selected cell. The first pick point is done with the ALT key down, which puts the element on the grid (the ALT key can be released prior to the second pick). In this manner a 1.5-inch device can be properly depicted. Note: If an element is drawn with the Shift key depressed, perfect circles and squares result. Note: Most elements from the drawing menu can contain text. Just draw the element and start typing.

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Draw all the major components including any wiring ducts that may be desired. Draw them as near to scale as possible, but they can be general. A group of terminal blocks that are 5 inches long by 1.5 inches wide can be drawn as one rectangle, for example. Be sure to leave adequate access room between devices. For example, leaving a minimum of 1.5 inches between a terminal and adjacent wiring duct is good practice. Arrange the components within the scaled area. Consult the enclosure manufacturer for standard sizes of backplanes, and select the size that would comfortably contain your equipment. Cross the backplane size to the enclosure size.

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10. Use sheet 2 of the Microsoft Excel workbook to generate your bill of materials. This can be done roughly or very polished. Microsoft Excel provides probably the best format for developing a bill of materials due to its ease in editing. Once the bill of materials is finished, it can be pulled onto the CADD drawing with no problem. 11. Email your workbook to your drafter to formalize into a CADD drawing.

B. Junction Box JB-TK10-01 Arrangement Drawing ARR-002

To follow the procedure outlined above, some research must be done. The big question for this small junction box is, how many terminals are needed? Also, what kind of terminals should be used, and what are their dimensions?

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The terminal block we have selected is shown in Figure 193. It requires a DIN-rail mount and one end-piece to cover the last block in a group. It is 0.33 inch high and 1 inches wide. It accepts a wire range of #22 to #8 AWG. Another accessory we will pick up is standoffs to raise the DIN-Rail 2 to make it easier to get to the wires.

Figure 193. Terminal block

That is about all that is going into our panel except for some wiring duct that is really optional for this task. So, lets design the box! First of all, after the graph grid is done, we need to decide on a scale. Since the terminals are approximately three to the inch, lets use three blocks per inch. We need to select a size that is slightly smaller than the blocks. It is best to be conservative and end up with a little extra space. First, lets find out how tall our box needs to be. Consulting our wiring diagram for this box, we see that we need a minimum of 24 terminals: 24 x .33 = 8. So, this takes up only 8 inches of vertical space. That, then, is our minimum starting point. Now, how about side to side? Our terminals are 1.5 inches wide. We need a minimum of 1 inches on either side of the terminal, preferably 2 inches. So, using 2 inches gives us a lateral inner minimum width of 5 inches. Plus, we have decided to use wire duct to support the wires and dress up the box a bit. We will use 1-inch duct to surround the terminals, so that adds 3 inches to both dimensions. To summarize, we have just designed a box that requires an inner panel that is at least 11 inches tall and 8 inches wide. Lets move to our Microsoft Excel sheet for the rest of it.

1. Set Up a Scale
At the Microsoft Excel sheet, pick cell C2. Enter the value 1 and hit return. Select B2, B3, and B4, and press the merge and center icon. This merges those three cells, which represent 1 inch. Now, pull those across to the right and the number of inches appears across the top of the page (see Figure 194). Do the same thing again, except vertically, starting at cell B3. If desired, those cells may be formatted to display the numeric values in the center of the cell by right-clicking the mouse and selecting Format Cells and Alignment.

2. Design the Panel

Pick Text Box from the drawing menu. Hold down the ALT key to activate the grid, place the text box, and size it to cover a width of 4 cells and a height of 24 cells. While the box is highlighted, configure it for vertical text and key in 24 terminals. The space allocated should be 8 inches by 1.5 inches (see Figure 195).

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Figure 194. Setting up a scale

Figure 195. Initial layout

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Always provide spare capacity. In fact, most specifications require 50% spare capacity on a new installation. That lengthens our terminal strip by 4 inches. So, we must adjust our strip length from 8 inches to 12 inches. Now, place the terminal strip somewhere out of the way, and lets draw our wire way. First, we know the wire way surrounds the terminal strip, and we know the wire way will be 1 inches wide. We need to add approximately inch above and below and 2 inches side to side around the terminals. Draw the wire way as described previously for the terminals. After doing so, we find that we need 15.5 vertical inches, not 11. Now, consult the vendors literature to select an enclosure. Note: Part II dealt with some of the considerations when specifying an electrical enclosure. In our case, we will select a NEMA-4-rated enclosure to protect against water wash-downs in the process area. A single-door will do nicely (see Figure 196).

Figure 196. Single-door enclosure

Now that we have selected an enclosure style, we must find an inner panel to accommodate our wiring requirements. Probably a 9- by 16-inch size will work. After consulting the enclosure vendors catalog, we discover that there is no 9- by 16-inch panel. The nearest inner panel is a 17- by 13-inch panel, which brings us to a 20-inch-high by 16-inch-wide junction box. Thus, selection of the inner panel leads us to the enclosure size. Return to Microsoft Excel, sketch in the inner panel and manipulate the duct and terminals to take the most advantage of the extra space. In this case, there will be a 4-inch area to the right of the termination zone that can be used for relays or even additional terminals should the need arise.

3. Generate a Bill of Materials

For each item depicted on the diagram, place at least one bubble and leader (see Figure 197). To make a bubble, pick oval from the drawing menu, and hold down the shift key while drawing to make a perfect circle. Then, while the bubble is selected, key in the desired bubble number.

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Figure 197. Function box with bill of materials

C. Summary
Our panel arrangement sketch, as shown in Figure 198, is now ready to turn over to the drafting department, where it will be added to the drawing that already details the interconnections. The shorthand technique we used generated a decent sketch of a small junction box. This same technique works just as well on a larger scale and may be easily adapted to generating a TC-2 sketch. The biggest difference is the scaling that is set up. Instead of three blocks to the inch, perhaps one per inch would work, or some other scale. All components should be redrawn to be proportional to that scale. Such a sketch can be used for purposes other than CADD development. Conceptual preapproval processes, for example, may be much easier with their use. The tool used does not really matter, however. The important information presented here is the thought process.

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Figure 198. Finished panel arrangement