Smart Manufacturing

Grundfos launches Distributed Pumping System to meet Asia’s sustainable cooling needs

Anders Christiansen, Regional Business Director, Building Services for Grundfos Asia Pacific with Distributed Pumping System. Rising temperatures across the world has cast a spotlight on the need to provide cooling in cities without overburdening urban power grids and in turn further contributing to climate change. In response, Grundfos has launched its Distributed Pumping System in Asia, which aims to help air-conditioning systems consume up to 50 per cent less energy than current conventional methods. Conventional systems often use up a high level of energy due to issues such as over-pumping to compensate for discrepancies between the chilled water supply and return temperatures. In addition, they have the tendency to run at constant speed and pressure throughout its operations, regardless of fluctuating cooling demands. The systems’ high energy consumption ultimately contributes to greater carbon emissions, driving climate change. A first in Asia, Grundfos’ Distributed Pumping System is a novel system capable of operating in optimised conditions at any time. It achieves this by intuitively regulating the water flow based on feedback from temperature sensors, meeting the exact requirements of different building zones, and intelligently controlling energy consumption by delivering the right flow at all times. On top of reducing energy consumption and operational costs, this new system achieves comfort for users of the building by ensuring a consistent building temperature at all times. This revolutionary approach to optimum water distribution is made possible by Grundfos’ MAGNA3 and TPE3 pumps – both ranges feature compact, intelligent circulator pumps fitted with built-in sensors, variable speed drive, controller and communication module, and state-of-the-art IE5 motors ensuring the highest efficiency. TPE3 is a dry-runner, vertical, in-line pump used as the primary pumps, while MAGNA3 is a wet-runner circulator used as the secondary pumps. The self-balancing nature of Grundfos’ Distributed Pumping System also means that control […]

ANCA Motion opens new technology centre in Taiwan

ANCA Motion has officially unveiled its new and expanded facility in Taiwan to service a growing market. A designer and manufacturer of flexible control systems; specialising in high precision solutions for CNC machines, ANCA Motion is a global leader in motion control systems. The company has deep industry knowledge with over 45 years’ experience and operates in more than 40 countries, with their head office in Melbourne, Australia. Dr Roy Ko, ANCA Motion Taiwan Branch Manager, said: “ANCA Motion has been operating in Taiwan for 14 years and have expanded over this time from just a few staff to a committed team of 40 people. We specialise in providing a range of customised products and solutions and have world-class teams in engineering, quality and supply chain roles.” On September 11th, ANCA Motion welcomed key government officials, customers and other valued guests to the grand opening of the new dedicated technology centre in Taichung City. Dr Ko continued, “This is an exciting opportunity to demonstrate our unique solutions, commitment to our local market and customers, and the energy of our vibrant team. In our demonstration room customers can experience personalised demonstrations of our latest products and an in-depth look at ANCA Motion’s technology.” Paul Bocchi, ANCA Motion General Manager, said: “Having this new technology centre in Taiwan, not only geographically places us in our largest market segment—but offers unique advantages. The new facility represents an expansion of ANCA Motion’s manufacturing capabilities, and importantly, marks the beginning of a new stage of growth for us. Over the coming years, our plan is to invest further in our Research and Development capabilities in Taiwan. This will create new engineering jobs and enable us to work more closely with Taiwan’s machine tool industry.” Recently ANCA Motion Australia and ANCA Motion Taiwan have become ISO9001:2015 […]

Australia’s first electric motorbike launched in Adelaide

The Fonzarelli NKD electric motorbike and its charging stations will be manufactured in Adelaide, South Australia. Michelle Nazzari and Simon Modra met at a wedding several years ago in Sydney and spent the evening engrossed in conversation about motorbikes. The pair of entrepreneurs stayed in touch as each went their separate ways, Simon back to Adelaide and various startups in the sustainability sector, and Michelle into her own electric vehicle company called Fonzarelli. “I had been working in automotive manufacturing with electric and hybrid buses,” said Nazzari. “That’s where it all started, but I looked at the powertrain and it’s very simple and thought, ‘yeah, I might give this a go,’ and so set up the company and started tinkering.” Nazzari launched her first electric scooter in 2012-13 under the brand Fonzarelli and has grown the business from there. Always with the push to increase mileage and with a dedication to motorcycles still in her heart, Nazzari reconnected with Modra to tackle the issue of charging stations for her NKD electric motorbike. The electric dual-sport mini motorcycle has a range of up to 120kms and can produce 6000 RPM and a top speed of 100 km/h. Modra, who is also an architect and Future Submarine design researcher at the University of South Australia, jumped at the chance to collaborate with Nazzari on the NKD project and convinced her to manufacture the charging stations and bike in South Australia. “It’s a legitimate form of transport – there are many motorcyclists out there who don’t have a car and we’re lucky battery power has become so reliable now and Peter [Coombs – Chapter president of Design Institute of Australia] did give the hat-tip to Tesla,” Modra said. “Now we’ve got this incredible range with the vehicle and we’re getting further and further out.” […]

Cobot companies in industrial applications

There are well over 50 manufacturers of collaborative robots (cobots) worldwide, but only a handful of these companies have so far deployed cobots on any meaningful level of scale. Tens of thousands of cobots have been sold as of 2019 and earned US$500 million in annual revenue for world markets. The Industrial Collaborative Robots Competitive Assessment analysed and ranked 12 collaborative robot vendors in the industry – ABB, Aubo Robotics, Automata, Doosan Robotics, FANUC, Franka Emika, Kuka AG, Precise Automation, Productive Robotics, Techman Robot, Universal Robots, and Yaskawa Motoman. For this competitive assessment, innovation criteria included payload, software, ergonomics and human-machine interaction, experimentation and safety; implementation criteria focused on units and revenue, cost and ROI, partnerships, value-added services, and the number of employees. Market leaders in cobots generally have well-developed cobot rosters, in many cases backed up by an ecosystem platform that integrates applications, accessories, and end-of-arm-tooling (EOAT) solutions in with the base hardware. With 37,000 cobots sold so far, UR leads, followed by Taiwanese provider Techman with 10,000, and Korea-based Doosan with over 2,000. Precise Automation, which uses an advanced direct drive solution to develop faster collaborative robots, was cited as the most innovative of the 12 providers, just edging out Universal Robots, who claimed the overall top spot due to their significant lead in implementation. There are several companies that are too young to be challenging the dominant parties in the cobot market but are developing new and disruptive technologies that will allow them rise to prominence in the years to come. Productive Robotics is a case-in-point. It has an arm with inbuilt vision, 7 axes for superior flexibility, long reach, and a very affordable price point, but has yet to deploy at scale. Automata, a British company develops a ‘desk-top’ cobot costing less than US$7,000, is significantly […]

Xcelerator speeds digital future of industry

Xcelerator is an integrated portfolio of software, services and application development platform that can be personalised and adapted to fit customer and industry-specific needs to help companies of all sizes become digital enterprises. Xcelerator combines the full portfolio of Siemens’ software for design, engineering and manufacturing with an expanded Mendix low-code, multiexperience application development platform. The Mendix platform now includes cloud and app services for digital engineering and Internet of Things (IoT) powered by MindSphere the cloud-based, open IoT operating system from Siemens, in addition to Mendix’s market-leading unified low-code and no-code development environments. Unique to Xcelerator, this platform drives digital transformation by enabling anyone in the ecosystem, including citizen developers and engineers to easily build, integrate and extend their existing data and systems.

Is technology making us less productive?

Technology might actually be killing productivity according to a new study – and an old piece of wisdom called Metcalfe’s Law. A team at Bain & Company analysed data on how people are spending their time at work. By combining this with productive output and total headcounts, they were able to see the impact of technology at work. “Technology can have enormous benefits in the workplace,” said Michael Mankins, a partner at Bain & Company, in an article for the Harvard Business Review. “But it’s fair to ask whether we have reached the point of diminishing returns in some areas.” Why is technology slowing us down? Tech pioneer Robert Metcalfe predicted that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of users. However, his law has a downside as well. As the costs come down, the number of interactions rises exponentially. All of these interactions take time. Consider the situation 30 years ago. If a manager was away from their desk, they’d get a note saying they missed a call – perhaps 1,000 a year. This then become a voicemail – perhaps 4,000 a year. Now, with the vast array of communication possibilities (email, Skype, instant messengers, phone) this has expanded to 30,000 communications. This is equally true of meetings. Setting up meetings before digital calendars was a far more complex task. Now, data suggests that 15% of a business’s collective time is spent in meetings. A percentage that has increased every year since 2008. All of this points to technology actually being a drain on productivity, rather than aiding it. What does the data say? Bain & Company’s research backs this up. Assuming a 47-hour working week, a typical supervisor or mid-level manager was estimated to have less than seven hours a week of uninterrupted work time. How is this […]

Powerful tube bending machines for Southeast Asia’s future

Powerful tube bending machines for Southeast Asia’s future The Southeast Asian economy is booming: countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam are increasingly becoming production centres for companies from across the world. Investments and spending on infrastructure are on the rise in the region. Against this backdrop, Schwarze-Robitec will be at the Tube Southeast Asia trade fair in Bangkok from September 18th to 20th. This is the first time that the German tube bending specialist will showcase its powerful tube bending machines at the Thai event, which is an offshoot of the Tube trade fair in Düsseldorf. Under the “Made in Germany” umbrella, the Cologne-based company will be located in the “German Pavilion”, the official joint exhibition stand of German companies that is being supported by the Foreign Trade Fair Participation Programme of Germany. The “Made in Germany” seal stands for the quality and tradition of German engineering, both of which Schwarze-Robitec embodies. Schwarze-Robitec’s powerful tube bending machines are used in many different fields. In the automotive industry, for example, the High Performance machines enable extremely high production speeds. This is largely thanks to their intelligent NxG control system, which enables almost all CNC axes to be operated simultaneously during the bending process. This helps reduce production times by up to 40 percent depending on the tube geometry. Schwarze-Robitec’s Heavy Duty machines, meanwhile, offer highly precise bending results even for very small radii and challenging tube and pipe geometries, which is a demand of the shipbuilding industry. The booster bending machines are able to bend – with or without a mandrel – even high-strength materials with minimal wall thinning and optimal ovality. This is a particular requirement of the boiler and power plant industry, which Schwarze-Robitec is able to fulfil with its Boiler & Power series. High Performance for the […]

Ideagen launches new version of Q-Pulse

Q-Pulse is used across the manufacturing and services industry to maintain operational integrity in line with standards such as ISO 9001:2015 among others. The software helps remove labour and bureaucracy from quality and compliance management, providing control, efficiency and transparency. As well as maintaining the software’s existing functionality, the browser-based Q-Pulse 7 comes with powerful dashboards for increased business intelligence and an intuitive user experience. Q-Pulse 7 is a modern, slick and visually rich software product that has taken the application to the next level, focussing on bringing data from all across the business to life through visually appealing and quickly consumable dashboards to ensure that users can access information that is important to them quickly and easily. The system can be accessed anytime, anywhere – significantly extending its overall reach. Launched originally in 1994, Q-Pulse first came into prominence as a quality management solution, helping organisations make the first moves to paper-free control of processes related to document, audit and corrective action management. Since then, each version has expanded its capability to help Q-Pulse become a trusted solution across the global manufacturing industry. Q-Pulse helps organisations build a repository of business-critical information that they can use to improve other processes. With Q-Pulse 7, all of this information can be surfaced immediately to improve the understanding of business performance like never before. It goes beyond simple analysis and opens up the entire database for scrutiny.

AI is here to stay. Now we need to ensure everyone benefits

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already in use in many sectors. Its contribution is expected to rise steadily, driven by advances in data storage, computer processing power and connectivity. Following the report on AI by the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA), the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi has launches a report that focuses on the opportunities and risks the “fourth industrial revolution” might bring to Aotearoa New Zealand. AI, in all its applications, is predicted to contribute some US$15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. This represents roughly the combined GDP of China and India in 2018. Australia and New Zealand are yet to develop national AI strategies. The reports look 20 years ahead, which is a useful period for policy development. The explicit focus on well-being provides a helpful frame to start national conversations about how to embrace these new technologies, leading rather than passively accepting advances from offshore. AI in New Zealand New Zealand has started to adopt AI in the government sector, with most government agencies employing some form of it. There are advantages in New Zealand’s small size and strong legal frameworks to develop protocols for data ethics and security, and intellectual property, and to nurture a diverse AI-savvy workforce. Placing equity at the centre of the conversation means that we can choose to adopt AI technologies across education, government and industry in the context of public good. This would mitigate the risk of importing biases from offshore algorithms and allow us to identify areas where AI can benefit all New Zealanders, rather than a small international elite. Within the reports’ 20-year horizon, specialist machine learning and narrow AI (a specific type of AI that outperforms humans in a very narrowly defined task) will help us to start removing the “four Ds” – dirty, dull, difficult, dangerous – from our daily work. Instead, we […]

Consoveyo Partners Hoang Vu in Long-term Agency Agreement in Vietnam

Consoveyo Singapore Pte. Ltd. (Consoveyo), a part of the Business Area Logistics Systems belonging to the international technology group Körber, is pleased to announce its new strategic partnership with Hoang Vu Trading Engineering & Services Company Ltd. (Hoang Vu), an industrial solutions provider based in Ho Chi Minh City. The new collaboration is part of Consoveyo’s move to extend support for local customers, and to expand its reach in the Vietnam market. Hoang Vu prides itself on its strong channel activities and its established network and presence in Vietnam, whilst Consoveyo has always been committed to provide flexible, individualised service to all its customers. This new partnership will not only provide local customers with a better customer experience, but also offer reliable and flexible solutions for growing companies in Vietnam. Poul Lorentzen, General Manager of Consoveyo Singapore, shared, “Hoang Vu’s vast local network complements Consoveyo’s rich experience and expertise as a systems integrator. Vietnam is a key market for us, and this perennial cooperation with Hoang Vu is the next step for us to grow the company and enhance customer service standards.” Moving forward, Vietnamese companies can expect greater ease of access to Consoveyo’s solutions and services through Hoang Vu’s extensive sales network. Hoang Vu will also extend dedicated support to customers in the areas of sales, installation, and servicing. Customers can expect the same quality service they have come to associate with the Consoveyo brand, as the Singapore-team will actively support Hoang Vu in providing the necessary training for its sales representatives and operation managers. “We are excited to be a partner of Consoveyo throughout Vietnam,” said Mr. Vuong Hoang Vu, Director, Hoang Vu. “With our many years of experience and success across all industry verticals in the intralogistics sector, we’re confident of bringing additional excellence to Consoveyo’s local customers.” […]

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