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In the world of industrial automation,
a Factory Acceptance Test or FAT
is simply a test for a newly manufactured control system
that takes place at your factory or your workshop
before you ship the control panel to the customer.
With a Factory Acceptance Test,
you make sure that everything works properly
before you deliver a control cabinet to a customer.
Now, don’t let this long looking technical word scare you.
If you look at your everyday life,
you actually do a Factory Acceptance Test or FAT several times during the day.
For example,
when you’re done writing something on a simple Google Doc,
you actually review the document once or maybe twice,
depending on how important it is,
before sending it to a friend or colleague.
This is actually an acceptance test,
done by you, on your computer before the document is sent.
This is what I like to call a Document Acceptance Test
which is Actually a made-up name
as I don’t think there is ever such thing as Document Acceptance Test
but the point that I like to make to you as an automation engineer
is that Factory Acceptance Test is not a complicated concept
and we do these acceptance tests several times a day working on other tasks.
Now that you have a good idea about the concept and feel comfortable with it,
let’s explore FAT a bit further through a practical example.
Let’s say that you are a company that designs
and implements industrial control systems.
These control systems often come in the form of a control panel
built into a control cabinet.
Let’s take this as our sample control panel.
You’ve built this control panel and now it’s ready to ship to the customer.
But before you ship it you want to make sure that everything works properly.
The last thing you want is to ship it to the customer’s site
only to find out that things are not quite working the way they should.
Consequently, you will have to spend countless hours
at the client’s site solving issues
that you could have easily taken care of before shipping the control panel.
So, as the name suggests,
an FAT is completed at the factory.
Now you may be wondering,
where should I start?
What do I need to test?
Well, I will show exactly that through a step by step example.
But before doing this
I need to give you a warning.
Electricity is dangerous
and can be fatal.
You should be qualified before doing any electrical work.
Alright, let’s get started.
As the first step,
you need to connect the power to your control cabinet and turn it on.
We have a main circuit breaker for every control panel.
This is where the power comes into the control panel for all of the devices.
To let the electricity come into the panel,
you need to connect the power to the topside of the circuit breaker.
This is a wire that comes from outside of the panel.
You connect it to the circuit breaker only for testing
and once you are done and want to ship the cabinet,
you simply disconnect the wires from the topside of the circuit breaker.
The power that comes into the panel can be anywhere from 480 volts AC
to as low as 120 volts AC
depending on where you are and the country you are based in.
Once you have the power connected to the topside of the circuit breaker,
you can switch it on for the power to flow to the control panel.
Although this seems a very simple process so far,
there are two important points
that you need to consider when trying to power on your control panel.
First, the circuit breaker generally has a disconnect on the outside of the panel
that allows you to shut off the power.
Before you want to connect the cable to the main circuit breaker inside the panel
make sure that you have disconnected the power using this switch.
Don’t take the hot power into your hand
and try to connect it to the circuit breaker.
This is dangerous.
I have made this mistake a couple of times during my career
but I was lucky I did not touch the hot wire.
The second point to consider here
is that when you switch off the circuit breaker,
the topside of it will still have power.
So, again, before you want to disconnect the power
you need to make sure
that you have disconnected the power from the outside of the panel.
Now that you have connected the power cable to the control panel
and switched on the circuit breaker,
you also need to switch on any other breakers or fuses
that you may have on the way to power the PLC and the other devices.
In the end, I also switch on the PLC power supply as well.
The PLC power supply could be installed on the same rack as the PLC
or somewhere else on the panel.
We may have one, two, or three power supplies on our panel
depending on how many devices we need to power on in the control panel.
The more devices we have,
the more power we need to turn them on.
So, you have connected the power to the main circuit breaker
and turned on all the devices on your panel.
That was pretty easy, right?
In the next videos from this series,
we’ll discuss the next steps for performing your Factory Acceptance Test.
Don't forget to like this video if you find it useful.
Also, we would like to hear about your experience of performing
the Factory Acceptance Test as an automation engineer.
What are some of the challenges you have faced?
Do you have any tips for the rest of the automation engineers here
when performing an FAT?
The next videos on this topic will be posted soon.
So, stay tuned!
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