Smart Manufacturing

MainMan service enhances uptime, safety and maintenance efficiency

Without Konecranes’ efficient cranes and time-saving maintenance programmes, ARC’s business wouldn’t be able to function. Steel reinforcing specialist, Australian Reinforcing Company (ARC), is benefitting from comprehensive, time-saving maintenance programmes and enhanced safety provided by Konecranes’ MainMan Planned Maintenance technology. ARC uses three cranes in its Launceston facility, with lifting capacities from 3t to 6.3t, to move heavy steel products of varying shapes and sizes, including reinforcing bars, reinforcing mesh, pipe cages and a huge range of customised fabrications. ARC’s products are used in industries as diverse as building and construction, infrastructure, civil engineering, energy and water and waste. “Our cranes are essential to our business. Without Konecranes’ efficient and outstanding service, we wouldn’t be able to function,” says ARC Launceston Branch Manager, Ms Wendy Emanuel. “We’ve used Konecranes right from the beginning and it’s not just the maintenance they perform that sets them apart – it’s their staff. The technicians are well-equipped, knowledgeable and polite. Their managers and support staff are easy to talk to and provide valuable feedback after a project has been completed,” she said. With more than 600,000 pieces of lifting equipment under service contract worldwide, Konecranes is the world’s leading crane service organisation. It is constantly introducing new technologies and innovations to improve maintenance efficiency, enhance safety and minimise downtime. MainMan Planned Maintenance Konecranes’ MainMan Planned Maintenance service is designed to provide an in-depth picture of the condition of all cranes and related equipment, as well as routine maintenance work, such as adjusting and lubricating, with the intent of satisfying the manufacturer’s maintenance recommendations. This service includes a preventive maintenance inspection, visual checks, routine maintenance, and operational and functional testing of your lifting equipment. Konecranes’ MainMan Planned Maintenance technology is part of its Lifecycle Care Preventative Maintenance Program, which looks at the whole life of the […]

Schneider Electric partners with Nozomi Networks to secure and protect critical infrastructure

Schneider Electric has signed a global partnership agreement with Nozomi Networks, the leader in industrial cybersecurity and operational visibility. Under the terms of the agreement, Schneider Electric will collaborate with Nozomi to provide customers in the industrial manufacturing and critical infrastructure segments advanced anomaly detection, vulnerability assessment and other cybersecurity solutions and services, helping them to control, prevent and mitigate risks to their operations and business performance. The partnership enables Schneider Electric to respond more aggressively to immediate demand for effective, operational technology cybersecurity services, solutions and expertise in oil and gas, power, building automation and other industrial sectors. Schneider Electric will offer Nozomi Networks’ advanced solutions for industrial control system cyber resiliency and real-time operational visibility to customers worldwide. Schneider Electric will combine its EcoStruxure IIoT process automation and industrial control solutions with Nozomi’s SCADAguardian platform for real-time operations visibility, including: • Advanced ICS Cybersecurity Solutions: The bundled solution will deliver the deep network visibility and OT cybersecurity industry operators require in one, comprehensive and highly scalable solution. Nozomi Networks SCADAguardian solution provides accurate asset discovery, superior threat detection and flexible and scalable deployment options to Schneider Electric customers. • Nozomi Networks Certified Consultants: Schneider Electric consultants around the world will continue to be trained as certified Nozomi Networks engineers, scaling to support clients throughout their cybersecurity solution implementation, and providing expert OT threat hunting and forensic analysis. • SCADAguardian Live in Schneider Electric Sites: Schneider Electric customers can experience Nozomi Networks’ real-time operational visibility and cybersecurity solutions via live threat scenarios running in Schneider Electric sites around the world. EcoStruxure is Schneider Electric’s open, interoperable, IoT-enabled system architecture and platform. EcoStruxure delivers enhanced value around safety, reliability, efficiency, sustainability and connectivity for customers. EcoStruxure leverages advancements in IoT, mobility, sensing, cloud, analytics and cybersecurity to deliver Innovation at […]

How much do robots affect jobs and productivity?

Robots’ capacity for autonomous movement and their ability to perform an expanding set of tasks have captured writers’ imaginations for almost a century. Recently robots have emerged from the pages of science fiction novels into the real world, and discussions of their possible economic effects have become ubiquitous (see e.g. The Economist 2014, Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014). But a serious problem inhibits these discussions – there has so far been no systematic empirical analysis of the effects that robots are already having. Industrial robots increase labour productivity, total factor productivity, and wages. At the same time, while industrial robots had no significant effect on total hours worked, there is some evidence that they reduced the employment of low skilled workers, and to a lesser extent also middle skilled worker. A first glance What exactly are industrial robots? A machine is an industrial robot if it can be programmed to perform physical, production-related tasks without the need of a human controller. (The technical definition refers to a “manipulating industrial robot as defined by ISO 8373: An automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes, which may be either fixed in place or mobile for use in industrial automation applications”.) Industrial robots dramatically increase the scope for replacing human labour compared to older types of machines, since they reduce the need for human intervention in automated processes. Typical applications of industrial robots include assembling, dispensing, handling, processing (for instance, cutting), and welding – all of which are prevalent in manufacturing industries – as well as harvesting (in agriculture) and inspecting of equipment and structures (common in power plants). From 1993-2007, the ratio of the number of robots to hours worked increased on average by about 150%. The industries that increased robot use most rapidly were the producers of transportation […]

Demand for higher quality parts and products to drive generative design

Generative design enables the design of lighter, cheaper components while maintaining strength and solidity, ultimately creating a higher quality product. For that reason, the adoption of generative design software is taking off in aerospace and defence, automotive, footwear and clothing, furniture, industrial machines, and oil and gas industries and leading to an uptick in engineering throughput in each of them, finds ABI Research, a market-foresight advisory firm providing strategic guidance on the most compelling transformative technologies. “The rise of the sharing economy and additive manufacturing will drive both demand for and the ability to produce higher-quality goods,” explained Pierce Owen, Principal Analyst at ABI Research. “Generative design expands design possibilities by creating shapes different from those that humans would create. It idealizes the design by creating something that best fits the constraints to optimise the products for various requirements.” For several years now, industrial companies have used geometric topology optimisation – eroding the geometric shape of a product given a set of constraints to improve performance – and are using it more as the use cases for additive manufacturing have increased. Generative design takes that another step by creating, or generating, the geometric shapes from an engineer’s requirements rather than changing existing shapes. Also, unlike topology optimisation, generative design creates many iterations, variations and/or alternatives for engineers to compare, rather than simply removing unnecessary pieces or particles. Additive will drive both generative design and topology optimization as it provides greater build freedom to fulfill a wider variety of designs. Traditional Computer-Aided Design (CAD) vendors such as Dassault Systèmes, Siemens and recently, PTC, already have or will have embedded generative design capabilities within their CAD environments as plug-ins or kernels. PTC acquired Frustum in November 2018 to do exactly that within Creo. Several of Siemens products, including NX, NX Nastran, HEEDS, […]

TIC-TOC technology moves Tactile Internet a step closer to reality

Researchers in South Korea have developed extremely fast information processing technologies that can help usher in the next generation of the Internet. The technology is capable of sending packets of digital information at 25 Gb/s (giga-bit per second) – 10 times faster than currently available speeds. Researchers at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in South Korea have developed technology capable of sending packets of digital information at 25 Gb/s (giga-bit per second) – 10 times faster than currently available speeds. The technology, named TIC-TOC, is a critical component of the future Tactile Internet, in which information is sent and received at speeds on par with human perception. The technology operates at a speed fast enough to download a 3 GB movie within one second. Furthermore, the TIC-TOC system enables more urgent data to jump ahead of other information packets and be transferred in one milli-second (1/1000 of a second), the same speed at which the human sense of touch works. TIC-TOC stands for “Time Controlled Tactile Optical Access” and is designed to work on 5G networks. The researchers anticipate the TIC-TOC technology will help advance virtual reality and augmented reality in all sorts of sectors, from education and healthcare, to entertainment and public safety. For example, it could be possible to deploy and operate robots in dangerous or disaster areas with instant sight and feel communication between human controllers and machines. When the machine sees something, the humans sees it, and when the human remotely controls the robot’s hand or head, the motion will happen immediately. The same could be true for telesurgery, with a doctor remotely controlling a robot performing the surgery, but the doctor feels as if she were in the operating room because the response is instantaneous. “The Tactile Internet is expected to be the […]

Grundfos honoured as ‘Top Best Supplier’ by Taiwan’s M-Team for third consecutive year

M-Team Chairman Jui-Mu Hsieh (left) hands the ‘Top Best Supplier’ award to John Pien, Grundfos Taiwan’s Plant Director Grundfos Taiwan has been named by the Taiwan Machine Tool Manufacturers Alliance, or M-Team, as ‘Top Best Supplier’ for the third year running, the highest accolade recognising exceptionalperformance and industrial excellence amongst its members from the machine toolsindustry. Grundfos Taiwan first joined the M-Team as a supplier in 2012. After winning the ‘Best Supplier’ award for three consecutive years in 2014, 2015, and 2016, Grundfos Taiwan was conferred the title of ‘Top Best Supplier’ first in 2016, and then subsequently again in 2017, and recently 2018. The award ceremony was held in conjunction with M-Team’s annual general meeting. The ‘Top Best Supplier’ award was inaugurated in 2016, with the aim of recognising outstanding suppliers who have won the ‘Best Supplier’ award for three consecutive years, distinguishing themselves as being amongst the industry’s very best. Grundfos Taiwan’s Plant Director Mr. John Pien said, “We are honoured to be recognised once again, by an industry alliance, as a leader in supplying pumping solutions to the machine tool market. This award is testament to our commitment in leading industry innovation by focusing on local infrastructure and technology development.” “We are proud that our solutions continue to rank among the top in the world, not only in terms of quality, but also in terms of serving the needs of the industries and people in the markets we operate in.” Mr. Pien added. In selecting this year’s winners, M-Team auditors visited all of its suppliers and evaluated their performance based on criteria around lean operation, business, technology, and service. For 2018, Grundfos Taiwan was the only multinational supplier to receive the “Top Best Supplier’ title. The M-Team first began as a collaboration between four major machine tools […]

Hindustan Zinc Limited and Normet sign comprehensive four-year service contract

Udaipur, Rajasthan, India – Normet and Hindustan Zinc Ltd have signed a comprehensive four-year Cost Per Hour (CPH) service contract covering all Normet equipment in Hindustan Zinc Ltd’s mines in Rajasthan, India. The value of the contract will approximately 60 MEUR over the 4 years’ time. Operational and service improvements are part of the contract: Normet SmartCare service management system enables efficient service management and development of service operations to next level. Additionally, Normet has built a new Service Center in Jaipur to ensure customer service close to customer. Development of new innovative services and training both Hindustan Zinc and Normet staff is also included. “Signing this contract shows the strong partnership between Hindustan Zinc and Normet. Together we have transformed our co-operation to next level – with strong business alignment. We are proud to be part of the development of Hindustan Zinc’s underground mining for even better safety, efficiency and productivity.”, says Robin Lindahl CEO and President of Normet Group. “Normet has shown good performance and commitment to develop together with us world class underground mining operations. The contract will not only improve the performance and utilisation of the Hindustan Zinc operations, but it will also enable driving safety to the next level. Normet and Hindustan Zinc will have a great and exciting future further developing and raising the bar for mining in India,” say Sunil Duggal, CEO Hindustan Zinc.

Lantronix expands partnership with Ingram Micro in China

Lantronix, Inc. a global provider of secure data access and management solutions for the industrial Internet of Things (IoT), has announced the addition of new channel relationship supporting the Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) region. The company has signed a new distributor agreement with Ingram Micro Inc., a global wholesale provider of technology products and supply chain management service. Under the terms of the new agreement, Ingram Micro Inc. will provide advanced logistics, product delivery, and distribution services for Lantronix external IoT device gateways and IT management solutions in China. “As a leader in providing knowledge-driven IT solutions to the Chinese market since 1997, Ingram Micro prides itself on partnering with established brands like Lantronix,” said Patrick Shao, vice president and managing director Ingram Micro PRC. “We’re excited to add Lantronix’s innovative portfolio of industrial and networking solutions to our catalogue of best-of-breed products.” “We’re pleased to add Ingram Micro to the growing list of Lantronix Asia Pacific partners,” said Kevin Yoder, Lantronix vice president of sales. “China represents a growth market for us, and the expansion of our relationship with Ingram Micro will allow us to further our reach and support new customers with our industry-leading IT management and IoT solutions.” About Lantronix Lantronix, Inc. is a global provider of secure data access and management solutions for Internet of Things (IoT) assets. Their mission is to be the leading supplier of IoT solutions that enable companies to dramatically simplify the creation, deployment, and management of IoT projects while providing secure access to data for applications and people. With more than two decades of experience in creating robust machine to machine (M2M) technologies, Lantronix is an innovator in enabling customers to build new business models and realise the possibilities of the Internet of Things. Connectivity solutions are deployed inside millions […]

200 MHz, 4-channel oscilloscopes ensure measurements at affordable price

Keysight Technologies, Inc. a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers, and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, has announced the 200 MHz, 4-channel models of the InfiniiVision 1000 X-Series oscilloscopes, providing professional-level measurements and capabilities at an affordable price, including 4-wire Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) decode and remote connection via local area networks (LANs). The new InfiniiVision 1000 X-Series oscilloscopes use the same user interface and measurement technology found in the higher performance Keysight InfiniiVision oscilloscopes. The intuitive front panel is easy-to-use and features built-in help enabling customers to quickly understand oscilloscope functions and improve overall test efficiency. Seventeen complementary training signals are preloaded to ensure rapid use of the advanced measurement and analysis capabilities inherent in the InfiniiVision 1000 X-Series. These training signals can also be used in conjunction with the free educator’s training kit, which includes a comprehensive oscilloscope lab guide and oscilloscope fundamentals slide set. “Visualising electrical signals to understand both timing and voltage relationships is one of the most important sources of insights for the electrical engineering community,” said Teit Poulsen, director, Altoo Measurement Science. “Keysight’s new 4 channel DSOX1000 series oscilloscopes provide the highest level of signal insight and functionality at an unprecedented low price point while retaining the legendary Keysight quality. Allowing more engineers greater insight in the behaviour of their electrical designs.” The InfiniiVision 1000 X-Series models are bandwidth upgradable via software license, enabling customers to purchase the bandwidth needed now, and upgrade as designs evolve in the future. The InfiniiVision 1000 X-Series oscilloscopes are available at 70, 100, and 200 MHz of bandwidth and accelerate innovations with: • Custom Keysight MegaZoom IV ASIC technology which delivers 50,000 waveforms per second update rate and 2 GSa/s sample rate which allows visualization of random and infrequent glitches and anomalies […]

The US$500 billion inventor

Materials scientist and physicist Dr Tuomo Suntola, who recently won the Millennium Technology Prize 2018 for his invention of atomic layer deposition (ALD), will be participating in the Global Young Scientists Summit (GYSS) 2019 in Singapore, 20-25 January 2019. From laptops to smartphones, many of the electronic devices that we take for granted today would not have been possible without the work of Finnish materials scientist and physicist Dr Tuomo Suntola. In the early 1970s, Dr Suntola developed a way of producing ultra-thin films, one atomic layer at a time that can be used to coat the surface of any material. This technique, called atomic layer deposition (ALD), has been used to improve the performance of computer chips, create high-efficiency solar power cells, and even protect coins and telescope mirrors. It also enabled modern nanometre-scale integrated circuits, which are essential components in virtually all-modern computers and smartphones, and many other electronic equipment. Today, the market value of consumer electronics that rely on the technique exceeds US$500 billion (S$684.5 billion). For his far-reaching work, Dr Suntola was awarded the biennial Millennium Technology Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of technology, in 2018. Dr Suntola, who will be a speaker at the Global Young Scientists Summit (GYSS) 2019, to be held in Singapore from 20 to 25 Jan, said that ALD could also play a key role in creating the next generation of batteries for electric vehicles and other products. “It can also be used for the manufacturing of new materials with as-yet unknown properties,” he said. A serial inventor Even as a child, Dr Suntola was interested in technology. He built wooden miniature replicas of World War II fighter planes, his first transistor radio at the age of 12 when the first transistors became available in Finland, and graduated to constructing radios […]

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