AutoCAD Electrical 2021 – Cross Referencing a Circuit Breaker with a Shunt Release Circuit

by Miles Nicholson

The IEC60617 standard doesn’t show every type of component and quite often you have to group symbols together to make the required symbol you want. As an example, a circuit breaker with a shunt release circuit and auxiliary NO contact is made up of several symbols. The shunt release circuit and auxiliary contact are optional accessories to the parent symbol; in this instance the circuit breaker which means that the part information for the circuit breaker, auxiliary and the shunt release are defined within the circuit breaker symbol. AutoCAD® Electrical using the graphical style of cross referencing only shows NO, NC and CO contacts so how do we get the software to display a coil as cross reference information similar to the example below?

AutoCAD Electrical has 3 types of cross refencing styles: text, graphical and table formatting:

Text: Displays the cross reference information in text format ONLY. This setting is taken from drawing properties if there are no cross-reference overrides specified on the inserted component.

Graphical: Displays the cross-reference format using the JIC-style or IEC-style graphical font. The setting is applied to the graphical font regardless of the tagging mode assigned in the project properties. This setting is taken from drawing properties if there are no cross-reference overrides specified on the inserted component.

Table: Displays the cross-reference format using the JIC-style or IEC-style graphical font. The setting is applied to the graphical font regardless of the tagging mode assigned in the project properties. This setting is taken from drawing properties if there are no cross-reference overrides specified on the inserted component. The cross referencing is shown with a table and is customisable in the style.

In order to display the coil as a cross reference symbol, we need to select Table style of cross referencing. This can be done on an individual symbol basis as an override to the normal graphical style or other style you may adopt.

If you do not wish borders to be surrounding your text, you can create borderless table style very easily (similar to Excel cell borders). Please review the following article on how to do this:

Creating A User Definable Cross Reference Style

Borderless table cells still have a faint visible cell outline, within the drawing, but this isn’t plotted.

​As the coil, in this instance is a child and doesn’t have any contacts specifically associated to the coil, we have created a new symbol called VCR2_CHILD which is a child symbol with no MFG, CAT, ASSYCODE attributes and has a TAG2 attribute instead of a TAG1.
The circuit breaker is the standard 3 phase insertion of a VCB11Q9, VCB21Q9, VCB21Q9.
The contact is a VCR21.

Right click over the parent CB >

Select  Component override

Select  Table format  

The cross reference format is entirely up to you so you don't have to copy the annotation format shown above! Only the highlighted option in red.

Select 

Select the following options:

N.B: Select ACE-METRIC if a bordered cell table is required or you haven’t created a borderless table format (Creating A User Definable Cross Reference Style)

On Symbol mapping, select ​

Select  and add the new symbol that represents the coil. In this case "?CR2_CHILD"

Select ​

Select ​ until you are back within the drawing.

The cross reference information will be displayed as required:

Note:

The manufacturers parts either needs to be added to the Catalog Browser or the  needs to be manually overwritten:

• The shunt release part would have a pinlist value of (in this case) of: 4,A1,A2;
• The auxiliary contact assuming a separate part would have a pinlist value (in this case) of: 1,13,14;
• The circuit breaker part would have coil pins (in this case) of : 1,2 with a pinlist of 1,3,4;1,5,6;

Combining means the pinlist is as follows: