| Article Index |
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| TOP 5 IN 2010: Automation technologies to watch for |
| Jim Pinto |
| Eric Byres |
| Marc Ostertag |
| Anders Lif |
| Sal Spada |
| All Pages |
Page 4 of 6
Marc Ostertag
- Marc Ostertag is the North American president at B&R Industrial Automation.
1. Integrated safety.
Safety will further progress to an integrated part of the control solution. Besides the obvious benefits, such as reduction of wiring, project commissioning and maintenance, this will really start to change the way machines react to various safety-related events, such as breach of light curtains, etc. Machines will be able to react smarter by going into a safe state versus coming to a grinding halt. In the end, this not only increases the safety of the machine but vastly reduces downtime — and this is where the smarter safety will very quickly pay off.
2. Energy-efficient drive systems.
Energy efficiency will continue to be a major driving factor for all industries. The biggest source for energy losses is in motion-related system parts, such as servo drives. While it has become common practice to link servo drives and help share one drive’s excess energy while braking with another drive that is accelerating, the new generation of drive systems can take this further and put energy back into the power grid. Such drives with power factors close to one will greatly reduce the energy used by manufacturing lines. The savings realized per year quickly outgrow the cost of the drive system by a large margin.
3. Predictive maintenance.
More and more we will see machines that can monitor their actual state with regards to maintenance. The big driving factor here is downtime versus uptime. Every time a machine requires unscheduled maintenance, the costs are huge since most are part of manufacturing lines that are consequently shut down. If, for example, the machines that had to be shut down could have already announced their maintenance needs, all service work could be executed at the same time. This reduces lifetime costs by a huge factor. The technology is there; it requires machine builders and end users to define the execution.
4. Remote machine monitoring and maintenance.
This is not a brand-new technology, per se — it has been around for years. Most control systems will have the functionality built-in to allow for remote access in order to be able to monitor the machine and troubleshoot any potential problems. Unfortunately, in many cases the machines are not hooked up to the company-wide Intranet and even if they are, they often are not granted any outside access. What is needed is a sensible policy at the site that takes security concerns into consideration as well as trying to reap the potential benefits remote access promises.
5. Embedded communication services.
More and more, PLCs are becoming more intelligent. One good example is integrated communication services, such as OPC servers embedded in the PLC. This brings the realization of site-wide data connection and data collection to the controller level and can, in many cases, make additional PCs obsolete. It also allows for a much cleaner integration and thus helps make processes and operations more transparent.
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