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Summary description of project context and objectives
The current economic downturn and the global economy competitiveness are
pushing many sectors related to manufacturing industry to adapt to an ever-
changing business environment looking for new ways to diversify their business.
In particular, there is a trend for manufacturers producing and selling durable
products towards selling the usage of the product (e.g. renting, pay-x-use), or
even selling the product performance or outcomes (e.g. pay-x-performance). In
response to these drivers, new trends have emerged such as the servitization
of manufacturing. The servitization can be also seen as a Business Model
innovation of organizations processes and capabilities wherein manufacturing
companies make a shift from selling product to selling integrated products and
services, with the aim to satisfy customer needs, enhance the company
performance and achieve competitive advantage.
Despite this, a limited application of Service-Oriented Business Models has
been observed in the capital goods sectors, especially within Small and
Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). This is due also to the lack of such Business
Model based approach that guides companies in the servitization process.
These new Business Models completely change the manufacturers perspective
over the costs and revenues arising during the product lifecycle. The relevance
of concepts such as Total Cost of Ownership, lifecycle extension or
maintenance management strongly increases, and thus the control of costs
related to the product usage and maintenance is mandatory in order to achieve
a profitable business, even at the expenses of higher costs related to materials,
production, processes or supporting technologies. Therefore, there is an
important organizational and technological change requested, and this is why
there is still today a limited diffusion of these new Business Models, especially
on manufacturing SMEs. This is an important change, and despite the expected
benefits, the transition towards such models is slow and mainly concerning
large manufacturers and multinationals. Smaller firms often lack managerial
vision, competence and resources to revolution their Strategy, Organization
(internal and inter-firm), Product Design, Maintenance/Repair/Renovation
Services and Economic Performance Measurement Systems (towards
customer lifetime value). Frequently capital goods manufacturers act as pure
suppliers of pieces of equipment while they neglect the opportunities stemming
from a more service-oriented approach. Thus, they tend to lose control over
their installed base, and therefore lose the opportunity to offer additional
customized services and products.
The aim of T-REX project has been to develop and prototype specific
technologies and tools, through three business application cases, as levers for
The KER G1 exploits the T-REX SOBM reference framework, which is based
on three levels:
LEVEL 1: a description of five archetypes of Business Models that
reflects different degrees of service orientation (5 Business Model
Typologies, see Figure 2).
KER G2: Platform and tools for an easy to deploy Predictive Maintenance
(PdM) solution for Fleet-Wide Asset Health Management (FW-AHM)
The Fleet-Wide Asset Health Management (FW-AHM) platform is supported
by Condition based Maintenance (CbM) technologies, including Condition
Monitoring (CM) and the Fleet Management (FM) software KASEM (see
Figure 3).
This platform offers, as a key innovation point, a methodology that allows
identifying the best maintenance strategy to be applied according to
customer objectives, constraints and preferences, which leads to a fast
deployment of Predictive Maintenance (PdM) solutions for FW-AHM. The
methodology links the business perspectives (e.g. financial, reusability,
maintenance) with technical objectives (e.g. usage, condition, performance) and
specific indicators and variables linked to each use case, at the same time that
facilitates the choice of appropriate hardware to support the local Condition
Monitoring.
To support the deployment of the PdM solutions, a distributed architecture
based on easy to deploy low cost devices has been defined and tested. The
FW-AHM platform distributed architecture includes standard local monitoring
algorithms & software to be embedded in different hardware solutions
depending on the range of complexity and performance requested.
Figure 5: Condition based Maintenance (CbM) and Fleet Management (FM) architecture
As differential factor, both embedded monitoring hardware for CbM and the
software remote platform for Fleet Management include some knowledge
algorithms to provide predictive functionalities. No other commercial
monitoring systems have this feature that allows a fast local actuation over the
vehicle (e.g. stop the forklift truck after a strong collision or when possible
KER G4: Service solution of Condition based Maintenance (CbM) for new
generation machine tool electro-spindles
The overall solution proposed exploits the features of a new electro-spindle
that has been re-designed from high performance and high reliability driven
approach, and for Condition Monitoring in practical applications. The new
electro-spindle has been equipped with a set of sensors that allow machine tool
manufacturer to retrieve essential data about the working and operating
conditions of the component.
The solution has been supplemented with the development of a new Computer
Numerical Control (CNC) software application that allows a machine tool to
perform some automatic tests at the same time that collects data from the field
operation and transmit it via FTP to a remote server managed by KASEM
software for the Fleet-Wide Asset Health Management (FW-AHM) platform.
This platform enables the company to offer its customers a new Condition
based Maintenance (CbM) service (see Figure 6).
The longer the system is up and running, the higher the income will be.
Consequently, the customers will be more satisfied. While some customers run
their systems only for half a day, some customers need to keep the systems up
and running 24/7, and in those cases Condition Monitoring is critical and
providing predictions for the future conditions of the system, based on the
collected data, is mandatory.
The Condition Monitoring system consists of a datalogger device with
software that receives data from industrial automation equipment and sensors
(through a Stubli robot in this case) and sends it through a TOSIBOX gateway
(with optional 4G modem) to PREDICTs KASEM platform and KINEs own
servers in cloud for storage, processing and visualization. KINE used TOSIBOX
for connecting securely to its robot systems to run remote diagnostics and
software modifications on them. Figure 9 summarizes the structure of the
demonstrated Condition Monitoring system.
Simply collecting data has no value, therefore visualizations and reports are
needed. PREDICT provided reports generated by their KASEM platform,
showing its potential as a tool for our customers on how they could improve
their production processes further. The powerful data visualization tools used
internally by KINE have proven highly useful for analysing problems and finding
solutions to them with ease. Currently, KINE uses these technologies in
extremely physically demanding environments and has gain much insight and
know-how on how to use the tools efficiently to keep its systems up and running
24/7.
depicted in Figure 11. Collected data on systems are sent to the FW-AHM
platform. Data can come from different sources and be of different types. In the
platform point of view, data are stored into their respective systems knowledge
base. Then, for each system, the platform processes collected data in order
to compute systems elaborated variables and indicators. When one user
requires information about a fleet or a sub-fleet of systems, the remote platform
aggregates system indicators to build fleet synthetic indicators.
Aggregation results are then presented in a static or dynamic dashboard.
User oriented services, i.e. Operation and maintenance services, can be for a
general manager of a fleet a dashboard of all the systems business indicators,
or for a technical manager a dashboard of all the systems maintenance and
health status. At the bottom level of the pyramidal hierarchy, a technical
operator, should have a fast overview of the systems status and should be
alerted at the right time when a system needs to be checked. FW-AHM platform
needs in term of advanced services can be summarized:
Data Visualization service: gather all the tools and ways to
communicate a clear and efficient information to the users (statistical
KER 4.2: Batteries sulfatation restrain (by pulses) and on-line monitoring
embedded hardware (ESENERGIA Pulse)
A battery can store and deliver energy through interaction between the plates
and the acid. In theory, the batteries should last for several years, but usually its
useful life is shorter. Even in new batteries, after each charge and discharge
process of the battery there is a capacity lost. This happens because of the
problems caused by sulfation. A first adaptive electronic battery regeneration
(Pulse) and monitoring prototype has been developed and tested by
ESENERGIA on forklift trucks batteries.
This embedded device contains the Pulse technology to avoid battery
sulfatation and to extend its lifecycle. An independent 3rd party study of the
benefits of the pulse was performed comparing several types of batteries
charges and discharge cycles, with and without the pulse technology. One of
the results of this study is presented in the Figure 16.
From this Pulse technology, the challenge was to design a Battery Pulse
device easy to connect to vehicles batteries, and which in turn gave also
information for the batteries monitoring like the following:
Voltage measurements: the batteries have normal working voltage
ranges, and below these ranges the efficiency and durability of the
battery decreases very fast.
Current measures: consumed current can be used to predict the
durability of the battery as well as to detect the beginning of the charging
and discharging cycles. Other information that can be obtained from
current measures is the battery capacity.
Temperature control in the core of the battery.
Electrolyte level control: the lack of the required electrolyte level is the
main factor that may dramatically reduce the capacity and life of the
battery.
Number of cycles of charge/discharge, including deep discharges which
indicates that the battery is correctly used.
As conclusion, with the new ESENERGIA Pulse device the batteries can be
protected through the elongation of batteries lifespan by keeping the electrolyte
level with a higher concentration, the regeneration of the electrolyte by reducing
the lead sulphates in the electrodes from batteries already suffer from sulfation,
the collection of information about battery operational conditions and finally
through the users information about bad habits. Also with the new Battery
Pulse device it can be protected the environment and saved money by reducing
the amount of batteries charges by half, by lowering the charging power
consumption and by improving the vehicle productivity.
Draw bar position detection: to monitor the clamping of the tool by the
clamps.
Piston back sensor: to detect the correct position of the back piston in
order to allow the rotation after a tool change.
The re-design activities let IMATECNO foresee that final reliability figures result
better than expected have been achieved. Main indicators to measure the
reliability are the MTBF or Mean Time Between Failures, the MTTR or Mean
Time To Repair, which combined can be obtained the system Availability (A %).