Smart manufacturing meets clever maintenance
12 March 2020
igus started its digital development journey to develop its products for use in smart factories five years ago. The aim was to make the maintenance and repair of its plastic energy chains, cables and bearings, more efficient and cost-effective. The result of this digitalisation process is the isense suite of sensors and monitoring products, making igus plastic products into intelligent solutions, or “smart plastics”.
There are several ways of finding the right smart plastics strategy, from completely standalone to fully integrated. This can be done by starting from the area of use, for example energy chains, or asking the question: what do I want from the system? Perhaps it is to monitor the service life on a display, or set off an alarm if a component becomes worn or defective?
For machine builders that are just concerned with preventing disruptions to production, the isense standalone system can be easily integrated. If pre-defined reference values measured by the sensor are exceeded, the NC (normally closed) contact is triggered and the machine comes to a standstill. Alternatively, the measured values can be transferred to the PLC.
When there is a high IT security requirement, the measured values from a sensor are transferred to the icom module, where they are interpreted. If the service engineer must monitor a large number of energy chains or cables in a production facility, the isense offline system is a suitable solution. For this application, an industrial PC is used to display messages, such as impending failures. For production managers and shift supervisors, this option facilitates smooth day-to-day work and enables them to efficiently deploy their maintenance technicians.
If manufacturing processes are more complex and components are made into assemblies or subassemblies during the production process, an overall view of the big picture is necessary. If a chain breaks or a drive is threatened by wear, the consequences can be disruptive: plant downtime, interruption to production, delays in delivery, time, costs and reputation. Just in time manufacturers and their suppliers need efficiently designed processes but, most of all, stable ones. The isense integration system makes a valuable contribution in this respect because a wide variety of topologies and standards (Profinet, Ethernet, EtherCAT, CC-Link IE) enable OPC-UA or MQTT to be integrated by an igus specialist into the existing software environment and the intranet. Incorporating isense integration into the ERP system also makes day-to-day work easier for production managers: where there is a production visualisation system in place for the entire production process, one click into the application displays the operating states of the various igus components. If a sensor reports failure or wear, this is also reported in the production visualisation system. Ordering of replacement parts can be initiated immediately and automatically in the connected ERP system.
With the powerful isense online, it is possible for maintenance teams to plan the best method to carry out servicing work according to priority. And, with integration into the ERP system, the appropriate replacement part will be available. This not only achieves immense cost savings over the long term, but helps shift supervisors, maintenance crews and even the warehouse team in their day-to-day work. isense online with a link to the igus CRM system enables predictive maintenance, whereby engineers receive an e-mail warning that drives will show wear in the near future, e-chains are threatened by failure or should be changed due to their age rather than only being called when the red warning light is notifying a shutdown. Electricians benefit from continuous measurements that signal impending cable breaks and then send a warning by text message (at the planning stage). Service teams can be put together in an intelligent manner and staffing shortages (and consequently complete failures) can be reliably avoided. To achieve smart warehousing and ensure that the correct quantity of replacement parts is always in stock, an automatic quotation can be generated in the igus CRM system at the same time as the pending maintenance message, which is then communicated to a previously specified contact person (in the sales department, for example) for easy and quick ordering.
But there is even more to the isense online system: the data from the igus laboratory is processed on a server with the anonymised customer data and also with open data of other customer applications in order to produce an enhanced data model. All of this is done using advanced machine learning strategies, that use complex algorithms to create ‘weak’ artificial intelligence. The result is a data-based ‘electronic design manual’, which retrieves the service life calculation from the protected customer area. From this data pool, which has grown over decades, igus is able to determine in advance the nominal/reference values for the operating states of e-chains, chainflex cables and plain bearings: thousands of existing datasets in combination with new datasets form smart structures, known as neural networks that are able to learn from the data – in a similar way to the human brain.
www.igus.co.uk/smartplastics
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