In a microcontroller circuit a floating ground is where the 0volt/gnd line isn't connected to ground. This may help immunity from mains bourne conducted interferrence.
Put another way signal ground and power ground should have different paths to avoid interferrence due to ground currents. In some cases the two paths meet at the power supply in others they remain separate.
A good trick is to design a link such that either configuration can be tried.
Del
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In my experience a floating ground was a fault condition used explain an intermittent fault. (...usually by programmers who don't want to debug their code.)
I think most PLCs these days are fairly immune due to isolation of I/O modules. If you are building your own microcontroller based system you may want take this into account or make sure the machine is properly grounded.
On the other hand I have seen some old wire drawing machines that had certain circuits floating so they could use the ground as a conductor for detecting a wire break. (Headaches galore to save the cost of one wire.)
Hope this helps,
Gordie.
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Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence. -- Morris Kline
You could float the system but any devices it was controlling would have to be separated from the control PLC by opto-isolators and grounded individually. Why do you want to do this?
Float Grounding
Re: Float Grounding
