Machinery and Equipment

Sensors on the machine continuously measure variables such as vibration, temperature or current draw, and a diagnostic system evaluates them on site and transmits them to a platform. Limit values are stored there. At Magna, technicians and managers receive an alarm on their smartphone or by email as soon as a value is exceeded. A dashboard shows time series and the overall condition as a traffic light.

Yes, older machines can be retrofitted without changing their control system. Balluff's Condition Monitoring Toolkit connects up to four IO-Link sensors for temperature, vibration and pressure and works independently of the cloud and the machine control. Climate Energy brought its refrigeration systems online within a few days using gateways from Visualys that connect existing Modbus devices. in.hub retrofitted twelve injection moulding machines with the HUB-EN200.

Machine downtime tracking records stoppages automatically instead of on paper and makes their causes comparable across lines. A manufacturer of beverage and food packaging had in.hub classify current and process data on six lines into production, idle and downtime. The result: 15 percent fewer unplanned stoppages, 220 hours of additional production time and an annual benefit of more than 18,000 euros. The investment of 5,900 euros paid for itself after four months.

Machine condition monitoring enables predictive maintenance by basing the service date on actual load rather than fixed intervals. On compressors, ifm uses a current transformer to measure how long they run under load and idle, because the compressor only wears during load operation. The moneo platform counts the operating hours for each operating range. This allows maintenance to be planned as needed, before creeping damage leads to unplanned downtime.