Cutting energy costs and optimizing production is the main goal for Italian companies that are constantly looking at sustainable solutions, from both an economic and environmental point of view.

Industrial IoT technologies offer themselves as fundamental tools for monitoring production and energy consumption, and are able to suggest the most suitable strategies for better machine performance. Let’s see how this is done.

Industrial IoT APP: full visibility of machinery

In the last blog post, we discussed the APPs, what they are and how to make full use of the features offered.

In this article we will go into more detail by focusing on the APP:  Machine Monitoring, the Zerynth Industrial IoT APP designed for continuous monitoring of energy production and consumption.

This is a solution that allows companies to enable industry 4.0 of their machinery, which guarantees: :

• Individual machine monitoring in its plant, both new generation and old generation not equipped with plc (retrofitting);
• visibility on processes thanks to the collection of information extracted from machinery operation;
• human error and time reduction with the help of alarms and data reporting.

Remote monitoring of energy consumption and production data is essential for the company to know the operation and performance of its machinery and understand how processes can be improved.

Additionally, Industrial IoT technologies allow data visualization via a web application, which allows immediate and simple access to the collected data.

Synoptic dashboard for machinery

Within the Machine Monitoring APP, it is possible to view two different types of dashboards, each containing information relating to machinery monitoring.

The first is a general view through which you have an overall idea

about the state and consumption of all the configured machines, while the second is detailed for each machine.

In the general dashboard, hereinafter called synoptic, the following information is presented for each machine:

• Machine name: since several machines are present in the same plant, it is useful to identify each one with its own name or code.
• Current state: the machine is no longer in a working, standby, or alarm state;
• Duration of the last production cycle: knowing how long the last production cycle lasted allows us to understand the statistics relating to the machinery processing, identifying the relative trends in relation to the production data.
• Total time of the machine in an alarm state: alarm management is essential for correct machine performance. Being able to identify the total machine alarm time allows us to ensure the identification of malfunctions and achieve a better general organization of production rates.
• Good products and waste products: with the piece counter sensor, it is easy to extract data relating to the number of products that are actually made, and distinguish them from goods or waste.
• Total consumption: knowing the total machinery consumption is essential to knowing how much energy we are consuming, letting us cut costs and reduce waste.

Figure 1. Machinery Synoptic

Thanks to the use of an Industrial IoT APP, it is easy to monitor information regarding the operation of all machinery in the plant from a single dashboard, thus letting us understand their performance and what interventions are required, especially, in the event of alarms or anomalous values.

Machine Dashboard 

In case you just want to have a more detailed view of the status of a single machine, click on the name of the machine in the synoptic to view a detailed dashboard containing more information than what is seen in the synoptic.

Fig 2 shows the dashboard concerning the detail of a single machine. In the upper section, the same values described above are shown for the synoptic, while in the dashboard below are graphs that represent:

• machine status;
• distribution of production (good and discarded pieces);
• energy consumption.

Figure 2. Machine detail

An example: the Drill 4.0 demo

To demonstrate Zerynth’s IoT Platform potential, some demonstration demos have been created that let one, in a simple and immediate way, describe the operation of the Industrial IoT platform in the area of industrial monitoring.

The example of the pillar drill allows you to better show the use of the Machine Monitoring APP, thus making clear the correspondence with the simulation of the digitization of a generic machine in the industrial field.

In particular, it was possible to monitor the state of activity and consumption of the machinery without having to apply any invasive changes.

Using a simple transformer, the supplied current is detected, while a pair of contact sensors allows you to count the number of pieces produced (simulated by the number of operations carried out by the drill).

Figure 3. Demo Machine Monitoring:  Drill 4.0

The demo simply demonstrates the fundamental themes and strengths of using Machine Monitoring for your machines:

• Connection through non-invasive retrofit
• Energy consumption monitoring
• Production monitoring
• Cycle monitoring (drive, type)

Enabling industry 4.0 on old and new generation machinery, thanks to Industrial IoT, allows you to obtain data quickly and securely from any machine in your plant and subsequently implement strategic actions for better final production.

Machine Monitoring for Industrial IoT

The use of Industrial IoT technologies allows you to extract data from industrial machinery in order to understand their operation and implement strategies that can optimize their processes.

Zerynth IoT APPs make IoT technology accessible, easy to deploy, and safe to scale and maintain.

In this on-demand webinar, we explain, in more detail, how the Zerynth platform works, what the APPs are, and how you can configure them simply and have them ready to use.