Industrial building and factories face a pivotal moment: how can manufacturers achieve ambitious energy-efficiency goals within technically demanding facilities, while energy consumption continues to grow? The ability of a factory manager to overcome this obstacle hinges on their approach to key decisions. Which investments will boost energy efficiency, lower emissions, and improve competitiveness?
Accessing new data streams and insights from the factory floor is crucial to improve operational understanding and achieve real-time production optimizations. As it stands, industrial buildings and factories are responsible for 54% of the world’s energy consumption. Overall energy efficiency (not just in factories) could provide more than 40% of the emission reductions required by 2040 to be in line with the Paris Agreement. It’s necessary to pinpoint where energy is being wasted in existing production processes and identify where productivity gains can be captured.
Fortunately, factory connectivity and digitalization are rapidly addressing this challenge by capturing real-time data at the asset level. Improved visibility into factory performance can help remove bottlenecks, extend asset lifetimes, and reduce raw material usage, helping reduce energy consumption while optimizing utilization.
What is a digital, connected factory?
A digital factory is dependent on data and comprises three essential components: connectivity, advanced automation, and sensorization of the factory floor. By utilizing data and sensor insights, decision-making is informed, and automation and robotics can be deployed to streamline operations. This leads to practical, actionable insights that optimize processes and contribute to minimizing energy usage and waste.
Help increase energy efficiency with the power of: Connect, control, interpret.
Connect: The hybrid Factory Network
Manufacturers need improved connectivity to collect and analyze data across the factory floor, enabling them to unlock capacity with the goal of reducing energy consumption. The ability to transport, analyze, and merge this data with existing information streams is critical. This is effectively the first element of digitization, adding real-time and non-real-time connectivity to access operational insights.
Unfortunately, legacy technology in factory networks poses challenges in terms of bandwidth, time sensitivity, and support for wireless devices. Transitioning to a unified factory network with smooth device connectivity and direct IP address allocation facilitates near real-time communication, independent node configuration, and scalable sharing of operational insights. Enhanced wired and wireless connectivity, with increased security and ease of deployment, allows companies to leverage the wealth of data generated in factory devices for potential productivity and energy efficiency gains.
Control: Creating flexible, automated control
There is a growing need for flexibility in the manufacturing sector, while still maintaining stable performance, consistent output, and high availability/uptime. Upgraded connectivity networks enable real-time data analysis, flexible manufacturing, and advanced automation, allowing factories to efficiently create personalized products and smaller batch sizes by quickly adapting to customer demand. Thanks to configurable, flexible, and precise control systems, factories can enhance energy efficiency by adjusting production flows with minimal disruptions.
Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) serve as the primary control system in contemporary factories, with I/O cards acting as the backbone, managing various components like motors, limit switches, pumps, and level meters. The introduction of new software-configurable, universal I/O solutions offers enhanced flexibility, allowing for seamless modifications to factory configurations.
Agile manufacturing relies on nimble control systems and advanced robotic technology that adapts to worker positioning instantly. By incorporating mobile robots equipped with advanced vision sensing and complex algorithms, effective collaboration between workers and robots is ensured, leading to seamless robot operations.
Interpret: Sensing and Interpreting for New Insights
Unlocking the potential of digital factories relies heavily on the network edge, which is essential for generating fresh data from assets. By deploying advanced sensors on existing assets, valuable information is obtained for maintenance schedules, workflow routing, and more. The advent of smarter, smaller, and more advanced sensors is transforming industrial automation, enabling prompt detection of issues such as product defects or asset health decline.
Complementing sensors with increased edge intelligence enables faster, more energy-efficient, localized decision-making. Sensor fusion and Intelligent Edge AI algorithms further enhance performance monitoring and optimization, while helping detect deviations
Fiona Treacy is Managing Director of Industrial Automation at Analog Devices.
To hear more about Analog Devices’ vision for the digital factory, join Fiona Treacy, Managing Director of Industrial Automation Business Unit at ADI, for her deep-dive webinar “Building Sustainable Factories of the Future” on July 15th 2024. Register now: https://info.themanufacturer.com/webinar-sustainable-factories
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