• What does the Railbus Isolator do?

What does the Railbus Isolator do?

The Railbus Isolator plays an important part in protecting the IS field connections of MTL8000 2/1 I/O modules (i.e. modules which have IS field wiring). It provides a barrier against the invasion of voltages up to 250V.

Conventionally, such a barrier tends to be placed in individual I/O modules, but the additional components and the necessary clearance distances would have restricted the number of channels in a module. This innovative alternative design was to place the isolation in the supply rail, i.e. the Railbus. This provides full 250V Um protection for all of the IS modules, not only against invasion from power supply but also local area network faults.

An additional benefit is that it reduces the hardware cost per channel and maintains the same channel density as found in 2/2 systems.